Tuttomondo (murale di Keith Haring)

Bright reds, yellows and greens cover the convent wall behind Sant'Antonio Abate: thirty human and animal figures interlocking like a puzzle. Keith Haring painted Tuttomondo in June 1989, months before his death, leaving one of the final public works of a career spent drawing for whole cities.

Why it matters

Tuttomondo is what public art looks like when a city says yes. In June 1989 the American painter Keith Haring covered the rear wall of the convent beside the church of Sant'Antonio Abate with thirty linked figures, executed in about a week and designed from the first sketch as a permanent, titled work. The municipal portal describes it as the last trace of Haring's art in Pisa. Born in 1958, Haring died in New York in 1990; the mural conveys a message of universal peace. It is a modern public artwork within a city renowned for medieval architecture.

What to notice

The mural contains thirty linked human and animal figures. The mural's theme is harmony and peace, and Haring composed it as a puzzle: two figures bend together into a pair of scissors, an image of solidarity cutting away the serpent of evil; a woman holds up a baby for maternity; two men support a dolphin, pointing to humanity's dependence on nature. The interlocking forms make interdependence a central visual theme. The rectangle occupies the plain plaster wall beside the church of Sant'Antonio Abate.

Context and history

Haring came to Pisa at the end of a decade spent turning city walls into his gallery, from chalk drawings on empty New York subway panels to walls in the world's streets. The standard account gives the initiative to Piergiorgio Castellani, a student who met Haring in New York and pressed him to make a work in Pisa; the project was arranged with the city, and the mural went up in June 1989 on the wall of the convent of the Servi di Maria beside Sant'Antonio Abate, covering some 180 square metres. Haring titled it Tuttomondo — all-world — and treated it as a permanent commission rather than a provisional gesture. He died the following February. The municipality's public works department restored the wall in 2012.