Federico Giannini
Giornalista d'arte, nato a Massa nel 1986, laureato a Pisa nel 2010. Ho fondato Finestre sull'Arte con Ilaria Baratta. Oltre che su queste pagine, scrivo su Art e Dossier e su Left.
If the Venice Biennale becomes a photo safari among outsiders. The limits of Pedrosa's exhibition.
Exactly fifty years have passed since an "Initiative Committee for Naïve Painting at the Venice Biennale" wrote to Carlo Ripa di Meana, who had just been appointed president of the recently reformed Biennale, an impassioned letter asking the ins...Read more...
Masolino's Year at the Dawn of the Renaissance. What the Empoli exhibition looks like
Carlo Bertelli was convinced that Masolino da Panicale's voice had begun to take on an "already entirely personal" timbre in Empoli's works. The scholar had in mind especially Christ in Pity, the monumental fresco that a then already 40-year-old Tomm...Read more...
On the maternity sculpture in Milan: a technical committee should give technical opinions
In some ways, what is happening around the sculpture of motherhood donated by Vera Omodeo's heirs to the City of Milan is reminiscent of a recent episode that occurred in Carrara, just before the Christmas holidays. A former professor of the Carrara ...Read more...
Journey through the workshops of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence
There is a guaranteed method for making even the most peaceful of restorers hostile: uttering the phrase "restore to ancient splendor" in his presence. Emanuela Daffra, superintendent of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, is explaining this to us in fro...Read more...
A park of works made with flowers. The contemporary garden of the Montellori Farm.
"Some gardens are described as refuges, when in fact they are traps." The tender early spring air that channels along the avenue of pine trees at Montellori Farm does everything it can to belie the aphorism of Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish poet w...Read more...
Do state museums really not know how to organize important exhibitions anymore?
In Italy there existed a sort of golden age of exhibitions, full of events of international scope and the result of prestigious collaborations and full-bodied loan campaigns, which today is inexorably over, the accomplice of an autarchy into which ou...Read more...
Antonio Iommelli (director Museums Palazzo Farnese): in Piacenza to bring museum and city into dialogue
Antonio Iommelli (Naples, 1985) has been director of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza since July of last year. An art historian and scholar of the Baroque, before taking on this important position he worked for three years at the Gall...Read more...
La femme de Claude, Francesco Mosso's masterpiece: a 19th century feminicide
Immense was the dismay caused, in August 1877, by the news of the death of Francesco Mosso, a talented painter from Turin who had passed away at the age of only twenty-nine. The tone of the obituaries was always the same: who knows what he would have...Read more...
A Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec finally removed from stereotypes. What the Rovigo exhibition looks like
Ancient is the problem of the correct framing of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his production: the long sequence of exhibitions that have been dedicated to him has looked, often almost exclusively, toward one part of his production, that of advertisi...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci in Livorno? A disappointing, modest and unstructured exhibition
Needless to get around it: they have a problem with exhibitions in Livorno . After last year's lousy Banksy show , a laughable parade of twenty-six multiples by the British street artist that replicated a format already seen and revised far and wide ...Read more...
Martin Kemp: Leonardo da Vinci fascinates us because he went beyond convention
Last Feb. 15, the Leonardo3 Museum in Milan opened a new interactive wall that brings together, on a large screen, all of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, which can be viewed and explored in depth. For theoccasion, Professor Martin Kemp, a British art ...Read more...
Andrea del Sarto's forgotten pupil. What the exhibition on Pier Francesco Foschi looks like in Florence
An artist who looked to tradition, always true to himself, the author of devout, compassed and measured paintings while painting exploded around him. For these reasons, as well as for the fact that he was neglected, perhaps deliberately, by Giorgio V...Read more...
A northern Tuscan: continuing to rediscover Raffaello Gambogi. What the Livorno exhibition looks like
Destroyed by illness and pain, rebellious in attitude, detached from the world and everyday life, an artist of the finest genius defeated by life. On February 8, 1943, Raphael Gambogi took leave of the world: alone, poor, desperate, ravaged by alcoho...Read more...
And Jannik Sinner becomes a work of art. Simone Tribuiani painted the Melbourne feat.
Vittorio Sereni was convinced that passion for sports was a kind of grand allegory of life. And that the "soccer league cheer," as he, an avid Inter fan, called it, found its root in the overlap between the temperament of the fan and the "figure" tha...Read more...
But do exhibitions in Italy really suck as much as Nicola Lagioia says they do?
Is there really a gulf separating Italy's exhibition offerings from those of countries like France or even the Netherlands? While in Paris hordes of visitors, including Italians, remain enraptured among the rooms of the Rothko exhibition at the Fonda...Read more...
Contemporary exhibitions in a 14th-century church. When can it be done? The case of Pietrasanta
If an ancient church becomes a venue for contemporary art exhibitions, how blurry is the line between a layout that respects its spaces and one that is instead heavy and invasive to the point of spoiling the perception of the spaces? Increasingly, bu...Read more...
The modernity of a supposedly inept. Serafino Macchiati on display in Collesalvetti
To get an idea of the way in which Serafino Macchiati understood his relationship with art, one might turn to a letter that, from Paris, the artist from the Marche region sent to Livorno, addressed to Benvenuto Benvenuti, in the aftermath of an exhib...Read more...
An incredible master of portraiture. What the exhibition on Giovan Battista Moroni in Milan looks like.
Even an acclaimed contemporary artist like David Hockney can perhaps be included in the ranks of Giovanni Battista Moroni's admirers. But even should one deem it excessive to burden him with the label of enthusiast, it is still safe to say that Hockn...Read more...
The armless beauty: on the Madonna of Camaiore, a mysterious work by Matteo Civitali
Perhaps the most suitable nickname for Matteo Civitali'sAnnunciata was found by Carlo Pedretti: in 1998 he compared some sheets by Leonardo da Vinci with the sweet little Renaissance Madonnina by the great sculptor from Lucca, and called her "the mai...Read more...
Artemisia Gentileschi in Genoa, a ramshackle exhibition between biographism and inappropriate shows
The very recent exploit of Costantino D'Orazio as curator of ancient art exhibitions has caused great surprise: the well-known essayist, contemporary art historian, popularizer and television personality who has been on the shields for years, and for...Read more...
A nativity scene painted on pottery: the 16th-century altarpiece in the church of Albissola Marina
In the church of Albissola Marina, the parish church of Our Lady of Concord, there is a beautiful painted nativity scene, from the 16th century, placed near the altar. And so far so good: there are countless churches that at some point present the fa...Read more...
Galileo Chini's Art Nouveau returns to the spa. What the Montecatini exhibition looks like.
Not much has been heard about the many initiatives organized for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Galileo Chini's birth, and it is not difficult to understand the reasons why: these are mainly situations linked to the cities most marked by...Read more...
Vladimir Kartashov, the Russian artist who brings his cyberbaroque to La Scala in Milan. The interview
From Russia to Italy, where he immediately made his mark despite his very young age: we are talking about Vladimir Kartashov, a Russian artist born in 1997 in Novosibirsk, Siberia. He moved very young to the far east of Siberia, to Magadan, growing u...Read more...
Milan, an exhibition on El Greco at Palazzo Reale to amaze the public
Scipione, who was the most tormented, poetic and passionate painter of the Roman School of the 1930s, signed one of the most intense pages of criticism on El Greco ever written. Scipione can be reproached for a lack of originality, since he wrote abo...Read more...
Mythical Turner: landscapes and myth in the English painter's art. What the Venaria exhibition looks like
"Turner should come to Rome [...]. Here his genius would find bread for his teeth." The consideration was expressed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, an English painter who was residing in Italy at the time, and who in a letter of July 1819 confided to Joseph ...Read more...
The Uffizi according to Eike Schmidt. End-of-term mega-interview with German director.
Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, will leave after eight years the museum he has directed since 2015. Schmidt, a German from Freiburg im Breisgau, born in 1968, is among the first cohort of directors of autonomous institutes created under the 201...Read more...
Italian painting today. A mapping? No, the exhibition at the Triennale looks like a sketchbook
I think the best assessment of the exhibition Pittura italiana oggi, the large group show that brings together the work of 120 painters at the Milan Triennale, is the sense of surprise that Davide Ferri notes in his essay published in the exhibition ...Read more...
Who was Boccioni before he became a futurist? A complex artist. What the Parma exhibition is like
The surface changes over time and centuries, but the substance of art remains the same, is immutable, is eternal. Umberto Boccioni realized this shortly after his arrival in Milan in 1907, having just visited the Last Supper and been impressed by Leo...Read more...
Why Morandi is one of Italy's greatest artists. Interview with Maria Cristina Bandera
Until Feb. 4, 2024, Palazzo Reale in Milan is hosting the exhibition Morandi 1890 - 1964, one of the most comprehensive shows ever dedicated to one of the greatest Italian artists of the 20th century, Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 - 1964). The exhib...Read more...
Is the great Pan dead? The death of Eros, the spectacular new work by Bertozzi & Casoni.
"When you are in Palodes, announce that the Great Pan is dead." A voice rises from the island of Paxos that stuns all the passengers on the ship: it is directed to Thamus, the Egyptian helmsman. On the ship people wonder if they should disregard the ...Read more...
We are all travelers. On the book Psychologia de viaggiatore by Remo Carulli.
Defining what a journey is is a rather simple task, at least on appearances: usually "journey" is understood to mean moving from the place where one resides, permanently or temporarily, to another place, which one imagines is mostly far away or at th...Read more...
Felicitations. Nostalgia, alert: CCCP 40 years later. What the Reggio Emilia exhibition looks like.
The last performance. The final act. The final farewell. On the most unlikely stage. Felicitations. Forty years after the release of Orthodoxy and twenty years after the last reunion, CCCP - Fedeli alla Linea find themselves together again, among the...Read more...
Why are virtually no more exhibition reviews being written?
Death of criticism. Disappearance of criticism. Crisis of criticism. It has been talked about so much, and for so long, that by putting together everything that has come out on the subject in the last thirty years, one might think of starting a new l...Read more...
Interview with Peter Campus: I do video art, but I feel I am part of the painting tradition
Until Dec. 6, 2023, Peter Campus (New York, 1937), one of the fathers of video art and among the most significant exponents of this expressive form ever, is the protagonist of the solo exhibition Myoptiks held at the Carlocinque Gallery in Milan (all...Read more...
Fabrizio Plessi's sense of ruins. What the Plessi Sposa Brixia exhibition looks like.
It was 1986 and Fabrizio Plessi brought to the Venice Biennale that year one of his most famous installations, Bronx, indebted to a certain extent to the art of Nam June Paik: twenty-six televisions arranged inside an iron structure, with the monitor...Read more...
Art criticism: how do we judge the quality of a work of art?
For the past few weeks, there has been discussion in the United States around a lengthy article by Sean Tatol, founder of the website Manhattan Art Review, on which the young critic reviews, with epigraphic and pungent writing, and always assigning a...Read more...
Uffizi Diffusi in its third year: a review of the project
It took shape in the fall of three years ago the idea of circulating the works of the Uffizi in the territory, among local communities, in places less known to tourism: we were in the midst of the forced cohabitation with Covid, ideas for more sustai...Read more...
How to bring young people closer to museums?
The occasion of the conference Towards a Culture for All, which will be held in the Salone di Cinquecento of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence next Tuesday, September 19, at 10 a.m., and which will deal with policies of access to culture, offers an opportu...Read more...
Blind leading the dead. What the Chapman brothers' exhibition in Pietrasanta looks like.
We live in the palliative society, argues Byung-chul Han. A society that has removed pain from the horizon of one's experiences, a society that tries to hide pain in every way, a society that has elected personal happiness as the supreme good to the ...Read more...
Continuing to spit on Hegel. Antidote to trivializations about violence against women.
Rummaging through the many communiqués that reach the editorial office every day, I learned that this year Mantua's Festivaletteratura will dedicate two meetings to Carla Lonzi, a fundamental art critic and unparalleled theorist of second-wave fem...Read more...
The sensual and ambiguous love between the merman and the Nereid. Max Klinger's masterpiece
Rarely do we find, in mid-nineteenth-century painting, paintings imbued with an immediate, almost shameless eroticism, such as that which permeates Max Klinger's Triton and Nereid , the German artist's most famous painting, a work that still manages ...Read more...
How not to refit a museum: the case of the National Archaeological Museum of Vulci
We are less than two years away from the 50th anniversary of the National Archaeological Museum of Vulci, an institute of rare merit that was opened to the public in 1975, with its headquarters in the imposing Castello della Badia, a severe fortress ...Read more...
An altarpiece for the duke's sister: St. Margaret presented at Trinity by Anton Maria Viani
Antonio Maria Viani was the prefect of the ducal factories in Mantua when his colleague Domenico Fetti portrayed him, in 1618, in a large canvas that was part of a cycle devoted to the life of Margherita Gonzaga, sister of Duke Vincenzo I: the noblew...Read more...
Leaving Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome intact? A reactionary and anachronistic idea
If there is to be found a real havoc that threatens to be wrought around the redevelopment of Rome's Via dei Fori Imperiali, it could be nimbly identified in the maintenance of the status quo. It must be premised, of course, that a smoky blanket shro...Read more...
Jake Chapman: The audience for art? I don't like to talk about that. You pick the beauty you like
From Aug. 11 to Nov. 5, The Project Space gallery in Pietrasanta hosts the exhibition "The Blind Leading the Dead" by Jake & Dinos Chapman: protagonists of the latest revolution in European art, the Chapman brothers represent the most provocative...Read more...
Among the ruins of San Bruzio, an ancient monastery in the Tuscan Maremma.
Wind, cicadas, calm. The ruins of the monastery of San Bruzio stand on the rounded hump of a soft knoll, hidden among the fields, along the provincial road that leads from the castle of Marsiliana to the village of Magliano, still tightly packed in t...Read more...
Genoa, why Palazzo Ducale scores own goal by not confirming director Serena Bertolucci
Strong concerns have been raised about the decision by the board of directors of the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa not to renew the appointment of director Serena Bertolucci. It must be said that so much has changed in the past year in the shadow of the Gr...Read more...
Leandro Erlich's exhibition in Milan: when art is Instagram-friendly
Dating back to 1999 was Leandro Erlich's debut in a U.S. gallery. The Argentine artist, now risen to the heights of international fame, was twenty-three years old at the time and presented himself at the Kent Gallery in New York with an installation,...Read more...
All of Luca Signorelli in just two rooms. What the five-hundredth anniversary exhibition in Cortona looks like
Seventy precise years separate the first modern monographic exhibition on Luca Signorelli, the one held in 1953 first in Cortona and then in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, from the more recent one, namely the one organized this year for the 500th anniv...Read more...
An anonymous summit of the Renaissance in Liguria: the table of the Master of Cesio
Writing about the Cesio panel, an extravagant apex of the Renaissance in Liguria, now preserved in the highly prized Diocesan Museum in Albenga, art historian Mauro Natale had spoken of an "absolute exception": it was not in fact customary for such a...Read more...
Venus of rags on fire between premature presidentialism and eagerness to rebuild
The last flames that, the day before yesterday, enveloped Michelangelo Pistoletto's monumental-scale replica of the Venus of rags had yet to be extinguished, but on social media and the online editions of all newspapers, local and national, comments ...Read more...
Wifredo Lam, a Cuban in Liguria among ceramics and sea wizards. What the Savona exhibition looks like
"Unclassifiable." This is the adjective, simple but extremely eloquent and fitting, that a few years ago Eskil Lam found to describe the art of his father, Wifredo Lam. There is perhaps no definition that better fits this artist so out of the ordinar...Read more...
Andrade's modernity as a painter before he became an architect: GAM's Temporale
Browsing through a nineteenth-century art history textbook, it will not be difficult to come across the name of Alfredo d'Andrade, the great Portuguese-born (full name was Alfredo Cesar Reis Freire de Andrade) but naturalized Italian architect whom w...Read more...
White Carrara, another missed opportunity to talk about marble: review below expectations
Examined by scratching the surface a little, the seventh edition of White Carrara, the festival that has enlivened the start of summers in the historic center of the city of the marbles since 2017, looks a lot like a Monicelli film. It resembles the ...Read more...
Here's how Ferrara and Bologna overlapped in the Renaissance. Interview with Vittorio Sgarbi
The exhibition Renaissance in Ferrara. Ercole de' Roberti and Lorenzo Costa, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli (in Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, from February 18 to June 19, 2023), is one of the most significant of the year, as well as ...Read more...
A Neapolitan in Florence. What the Luca Giordano exhibition at Palazzo Medici Riccardi is like.
Florence owes much of its late Baroque facies to a Neapolitan. If there had been no Luca Giordano, who knows what paths the great decoration of the early 18th century in Florence would have taken: perhaps, spectacular frescoes such as Giuseppe Nicola...Read more...
The most beautiful works in Naples? They are everywhere but in Naples. On loans from Capodimonte and MANN.
Right now, many of Naples ' most important works of art can be found anywhere but Naples. This is thanks to the singular lending policies of the city's two main state museums, the National Museum of Capodimonte and the National Archaeological Museum ...Read more...
Francesco Bianchi Ferrari's Annunciation: a theological compendium in a single scene
To paint one of the most widely represented Gospel episodes in the history of art, the Annunciation, while transforming the scene, so familiar and so traditional, into a narrative capable of also showing the faithful the entire history of salvation. ...Read more...
The crowds at free museums are not a great achievement, they are worrisome
Yesterday, a few hours after the conclusion of the free Sunday on June 4, for the first time combined with another narrow free admission (the one instituted for Republic Day), Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano triumphantly declared that the Sunday...Read more...
The ceramics of a great artist who did not like ceramics. Fausto Melotti's exhibition in Lucca
Perhaps, in Fausto Melotti's intentions, an exhibition such as the one the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca is dedicating to him this year should never have been held. The project, curated by Ilaria Bernardi, brings to the halls of the San Micheletto c...Read more...
Capodimonte recidivist. On the senseless loan of 70 jewels to the Louvre.
We have already spoken several times on these pages about the extreme nonchalance with which the two main museums in Naples, the MANN and Capodimonte, lend their family jewels, now in an ever-increasing stream. Regarding the National Archae...Read more...
That disastrous pope who loved the arts. What the exhibition on Urban VIII at Palazzo Barberini looks like.
Seventeenth-century Romans did not hold Urban VIII in high esteem, despite the fact that even today traces of his pontificate can be found scattered all over Rome, and despite the fact that the twenty-one years of his reign, from 1623 to 1644, are pr...Read more...
Hunting Michelangelo's David: why recent positions on images are anachronistic
While in a small town in Brazil they were finishing pulling up a circa 1:3 scale replica of the Trevi Fountain, in Italy the Court of Florence recognized the existence of a "right to the image of cultural heritage" by letting the Galleria dell'Accade...Read more...
Perugino, Italy's best master. Here's what the Perugia exhibition looks like
In the eyes of Agostino Chigi, Perugino was the "best master in Italy." He wrote this in a letter sent to his father Mariano on November 7, 1500, discussing the possibility of commissioning him to paint an altarpiece for the family altar in the churc...Read more...
Why it is unrealistic to propose making museums free by cutting military spending
A great populist classic of cultural heritage: free museums funded by cuts in military spending. The proposal, which is far from new, was reiterated earlier this week by Tomaso Montanari in an interview with Fortune Italia: "A courageous move would b...Read more...
Goodbye to good museum directors? Three topics of discussion on the new call for proposals
There has been a lot of talk in recent days about the language barrier that Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano would like to impose for the call for applications for the competition by which as many as thirteen new directors of autonomous museums w...Read more...
Nicola Bolla's painting, from Pigment Paintings to LP paintings
Everyone knows For the love of God, the diamond-covered skull that Damien Hirst executed in 2007 garnering worldwide praise and acclaim. How many, however, know the artist who most likely inspired it? One has to look to Piedmont, where Nicola Bolla w...Read more...
A Cremonese among the Venetians. The Madonna of Altobello Melone at the Carrara Academy.
As soon as one arrives in the hall of the Veneti at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, after laying eyes on Altobello Melone's Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, one will realize that the caption accompanying the painting tends to emphasize th...Read more...
All the humanity of the poor by Giacomo Ceruti. What the Miseria&Nobiltà exhibition in Brescia looks like.
To think of eighteenth-century art, images of vast heavenly expanses, frivolous worldly amusements, large airy and terse halls, mirrors, gardens, wigs, feathers, and swings immediately come to mind. One tends to think less of an art that depicted the...Read more...
Laura Casalis (Franco Maria Ricci): this is how FMR magazine was reborn.
The historic FMR magazine, founded in 1982, returned to publication in December 2021 after a long period of stop. After the first year of the "new" FMR, we spoke with Laura Casalis, editor-in-chief of the magazine and a work and life companion of the...Read more...
Duchess, patron, influencer: all the faces of Eleanor of Toledo on display in Florence
The first image that rushes to mind when one thinks of Eleanor of Toledo can only inevitably be Bronzino's sumptuous portrait in which the splendid duchess of Florence, clad in one of the most material and evocative dresses in the history of art, is ...Read more...
Images of the sea in painting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
San Martino d'Albaro is today a crowded and densely urbanized district of Genoa, now completely incorporated into the city, and whose ancient physiognomy has become almost unrecognizable. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was a country haml...Read more...
Banksy in Livorno: yet another commercial exhibition in a city that can and should do better
It is now pleonastic to discuss the usefulness of yet another Banksy exhibition. Those who would like to go to the Museum of the City of Livorno and spend twelve euros to see an exhibition composed of twenty-six multiples of Banksy, more or less the ...Read more...
A sumptuous painting by Camillo Procaccini hidden in the heart of Milan: the Martyrdom of St. Theodore
The basilica of Santo Stefano Maggiore is mentioned in Milan's guidebooks mainly for having been the church where the young Michelangelo Merisi, destined as an adult to become Caravaggio, was baptized: this was discovered in 2007, when an archival do...Read more...
Tærra bōnn-a. Brief travel notes on the ceramics of Savona and Albissola.
If one wanted to find some trace, some fragment of the ancient history of Savona's Palazzo del Monte di Pietà ("one of the first in Europe," as tourist guides take pains to point out), one would struggle to notice it on the outside, on the nin...Read more...
The fascination of color to discover light and the supersensible. The painting of Maurizio Faleni
If you want to start finding a motif for your own artwork, look at a stain on the wall. This was the suggestion that Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, gave to young artists: the example came to him from a friend of his, a certain Sandro...Read more...
The dreamlike expressionism of Francesca Banchelli
One could start from a first, single noun to introduce the art of Francesca Banchelli (Montevarchi, 1981), one of the most interesting names in young Italian painting: "encounter." It is perhaps the first word that comes up every time you look at her...Read more...
Ferrara great capital of the Renaissance. What the exhibition on Ercole de' Roberti and Lorenzo Costa looks like.
Against the simplifications of a scholastic vulgata that often tends to trivialize the events of the fifteenth century in Ferrara, leading one to consider them almost a sort of vernacular emanation of a broader "Renaissance" centered on Tuscany, one ...Read more...
Vittorio Sgarbi speaks: We need to create a catalog of ancient goods in private hands
A catalog of antique goods, dating from before 1920, in the possession of private individuals: this is Vittorio Sgarbi's idea to make the market more agile and free both the state and dealers and collectors from the current notification system. Accor...Read more...
A decorating artist: interview with Filippo Perego, dean of interior decorators
A life spent furnishing the homes of Italians with taste and passion: Count Filippo Perego di Cremnago (Milan, 1930), one of the first and most important interior decorators in our country, has recently set up a foundation that bears his name and aim...Read more...
Don't touch Achille Bonito Oliva: he is an artist, and the work of art is his texts
Achille Bonito Oliva is right when, in his "Lecture" published in Robinson last February 18, he asserts with solid conviction that the work of art does not exist as a monad, but as a portion of a system that is completed by the surplus value guarante...Read more...
Surprise: the one on Van Gogh in Rome is not the usual box office exhibition
It is difficult to avoid the risk of setting up an exhibition that has already been seen when dealing with Vincent van Gogh. That is, one of the artists whose name recurs most often in the exhibition palimpsests of half the world: it will suffice to ...Read more...
The Flogging of Farfa: when an old futurist struggles with matter.
Behind the successes of a great artist there is always the work of a large group of people who make them possible. It has always been so in the history of art: in the Renaissance there were workshops, even tiny ones, but they always relied on a preci...Read more...
All about the young John Paul Panini: the exhibition-dossier in Piacenza
Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that Giovanni Paolo Panini is rightfully among that select group of artists who can claim to have not one, but two dates of birth. In Panini's case, the first is the date on which he was born in Piacenza, June 17,...Read more...
The disjointed nonconformity of Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli's Annunciation
The eyes of those who arrive in Room 12 of the National Museum of Capodimonte are typically caught by the mysterious and bewitching gaze of Parmigianino'sAntea , or the fixed and penetrating gaze of Galeazzo Sanvitale hanging beside her, another mast...Read more...
Why do so many key masterpieces from the GNAM in Rome have to stay in China for eight months?
The first had been the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, which had sent its jewels to Texas in early 2020: about forty select pieces including Caravaggio's Flagellation, Parmigianino'sAntea, Guido Reni'sAtalanta and Hippomenes, and Titian's Danae, i.e....Read more...
The reconstruction of the Herrera Chapel: Annibale Carracci is given back his last feat
The facade of the church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, so smooth, sober, spartan, rigid in its geometric tripartition, does not say much to the millions of people who wander around Piazza Navona and pass by it without paying too much attention. Ye...Read more...
Recycling Beauty at the Prada Foundation: a missed opportunity to talk about reuse and recycling
The Rome of the first half of the 14th century saw the beginning of a "slow and complex revolution," writes Eloisa Dodero in the catalog of the exhibition Recycling Beauty, the show that the Fondazione Prada in Milan, in the spaces of the Podium and ...Read more...
Uffizi at 25 euros. Controversy over the extra 5 euros is useless if the real issue is not discussed
It has generated a predictable controversy the news of the Uffizi ticket increase from 20 to 25 euros in high season, although it will be worth mentioning that the low season rate (12 euros) has not been adjusted and that a ticket for early visitors ...Read more...
Serafino De Tivoli's pasture: more than a painting, a piece of the real seen from the window
It is the dawn of a clear morning in the countryside around Florence, and in the calm that envelops the hills around the city, a painter stops in front of a small lonely stream to stare quickly at the scene he sees before him: a pair of cows, one whi...Read more...
Unpublished Gino Romiti between D'Annunzio and Angelo Conti. The exhibition in Livorno and Collesalvetti
"Here is a book of faith, here is a treatise of love, composed by a candid and most fervent spirit, by an enthusiastic exegete to whom the work of art appears as nothing but religion made sensible under a living form": these are the words with which ...Read more...
Uffizi Diffusi will have more than 100 locations and will continue for a long time. Interview with Eike Schmidt
A year and a half after the birth of the Uffizi Diffusi project, it is time to take stock: how many more locations will the project have? How will it continue? Next year will also see the first return of a Uffizi work to a local church: to what exten...Read more...
A Rubens in Genoa not fully resolved. Lights and shadows of the Palazzo Ducale exhibition
Exactly four hundred years have passed since the publication of Pieter Paul Rubens's Palazzi di Genova, the book with which the great Flemish artist, moved by a keen interest in Genoese architecture, so much so that he gave the volume to the presses ...Read more...
A nativity scene that served as a predella. Antonio Begarelli's masterpiece in Modena Cathedral.
It is not easy to make a nativity scene, wrote Dino Buzzati. It is a "job that may seem like a game and is instead charged with seriousness and mystery," a job not suitable "for mothers," because it "requires skill organizational skills, technica...Read more...
The Farrattini Altarpiece, singular story of an early masterpiece by Federico Zuccari
The curious and unusual affair of the altarpiece that Federico Zuccari painted for the Farrattini Chapel in the Cathedral of Amelia in Umbria, an early masterpiece of the painter from the Marche region, is a beautiful story about a separation and a r...Read more...
See Narni through the eyes of travelers and painters of the Grand Tour
The ruins of the Bridge of Augustus that appear unexpected and imposing after traveling through hills thick with woods and forests. The ominous gorges of the Nera that evoke mysteries, legends, magical presences. A village with an almost intact medie...Read more...
Piranesi's Rome in the Views of the National Gallery of Umbria: a fine exhibition
In front of their eyes the imposing and threatening mass of the Alps, in their hearts the longing for the eternal Urbe, in their minds the images they saw at home while leafing through Piranesi's Views of Rome. We can imagine them this way, the trave...Read more...
Pisa's Palazzo Blu takes stock of Macchiaioli history
Already after the first rooms of the Macchiaioli exhibition in Pisa, the public will be able to breathe a sigh of relief: at last an exhibition on the subject that does not disappoint expectations. And yes, it should perhaps be clear from the title t...Read more...
Arcadia in Painting. Donato Creti's pastoral fable at the Pinacoteca di Bologna.
Renato Roli wrote in his monograph on Donato Creti, published in 1967, that the Emilian painter's Scena d'Arcadia , now housed in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, was worth more than any of his other works to earn him the "flattering appellation ...Read more...
Luigi Abete: we should not be afraid of private enterprises in culture
Cultural assets managed by public entities, private entities managing publicly owned cultural assets: the dichotomy between public and private in the management of cultural assets in Italy has given rise to a long-standing debate in which ideological...Read more...
Bright, tumultuous, splendid Pisanello: on the Mantua exhibition at the Ducal Palace.
To give an idea of the uniqueness of an exhibition featuring Pisanello as its protagonist, it will suffice to recall that twenty-one years have passed since the last exhibition dedicated to him (at the National Gallery in London, in 2001), and that i...Read more...
The memory of information. Gianluigi Colin and his monumental speech in Piacenza.
Among the frescoes in the Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo, one of four that Raphael frescoed with his collaborators in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace as soon as he arrived in Rome, is one that depicts the coronation of Charlemagne: the iconographic pro...Read more...
The Alternative to Futurism. Leonardo Dudreville and New Tendencies on display in Lucca
Four words, aphoristic, lapidary and forceful, express the credo Leonardo Dudreville would profess from the 1920s onward: "clear ideas, clearly expressed." Clear ideas, vigorously rejecting previous abstract research. Clearly expressed, to welcome th...Read more...
Olafur Eliasson in Florence, what is behind his play of light and reflections?
It is among the words of Ólafur Elíasson himself that one needs to find the most interesting elements of his large-scale solo exhibition Nel tuo tempo (In Your Time), the long-awaited event that Palazzo Strozzi is dedicating to the Dani...Read more...
Tomato versus Van Gogh's Sunflowers. But art and nature are on the same side
"What is worth more, art or life?" Here, if the two activists who threw tomato sauce at the glass protecting Van Gogh's Sunflowers had studied a little more, they evidently would have been careful not to put the question in such peremptorily Manichea...Read more...
Who was Antonio Ligabue? An exhibition in Modena to learn about the man, the artist, and his greatness
Browsing through the ever-expanding bibliography devoted to Antonio Ligabue, it will not be uncommon to come across comparisons with Vincent van Gogh, a painter with whom Ligabue shared part of the personal story (both experienced loneliness, margina...Read more...
Genoa, on display at Palazzo Negrone news about Fiasella and paintings exhibited for the first time
The year that Genoa devoted to Baroque art, fostering several exhibitions of considerable depth in the city and outside (it will be worth mentioning at least the Superbarocco project at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, the exhibition on Domenico P...Read more...
If Anselm Kiefer covers Tintoretto in Venice's Doge's Palace.
Those who feel like going or returning to see, between now and the end of the month, the large cycle that Anselm Kiefer has executed for the Scrutiny Room of the Ducal Palace, might attempt an exercise: Record the comments of visitors who, ha...Read more...
The beach as a mental thing. The Versilia of Carlo CarrÃ
It was Arturo Dazzi from Carrara who convinced Carlo Carrà to spend the summer of 1926 in Versilia. The two had met at the Venice Biennale that year: contemporaries, artists with an established path, they were going through two profoundly diff...Read more...
Isao Sugiyama. Forty years in Italy, seeking dialogue between man and nature. The interview
Born in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1954, Isao Sugiyama is an artist who has lived and worked in Carrara, Italy, since 1983. His path began with figurative art and then came to Shrines, the series that has characterized his work since 1989 and which Sugiyama...Read more...
Children's games from around the world. Francis Alÿs' poetry at the Venice Biennale
Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Aug. 21, 2021. On the shore of a mound formed by the waste materials of a cobalt mine, a child, dressed in a yellow and green soccer shirt and a pair of red shorts, climbs up pushing the dusty tire of a truck...Read more...
Ten urgent priorities for the next minister of culture
CulturalItaly has emerged devastated from two years of pandemic. This is not a statement tinged with sensationalism: there are data certifying all the serious difficulties the sector is going through. Federculture's latest report released worrying d...Read more...
Gerard David's Our Lady of the Loaf: a mother feeding her child.
One does not necessarily have to think of childish romanticisms when, in the first room of the Flemish in the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, one reads the caption accompanying Gerard David's splendid panel on the right wall and notices that someone chose t...Read more...
Art as sign, light, balance between measure and non-measure. Interview with Guido Strazza
Guido Strazza (Santa Fiora, 1922) is one of the most significant figures in Italian art in recent decades. Discovered by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he debuted as a Futurist aeropainter and then became one of the leading Italian exponents of research ...Read more...
Still Life with Cherries, one of the very rare works by Paul Cézanne that we have in Italy
It is thanks to a few enlightened minds that we can admire a scant handful of Paul Cézanne's paintings in Italian museums today. Palma Bucarelli who bought Cabanon du Jourdan, believed to be Cézanne's last painting, for the Galleria d'A...Read more...
All of Federico da Montefeltro in one exhibition. Gubbio's exhibition for the 600th anniversary
When one thinks of Federico da Montefeltro, it comes naturally to associate the figure of this condottiere and patron with the great palace that stands out against the skyline of the capital of his duchy, Urbino, the main center of his power, the sea...Read more...
The secrets of Uffizi communication. Tommaso Galligani, press office manager, speaks.
In recent years, the Uffizi has become a major player in the world of museums internationally, thanks in part to frequent, constant, pervasive, effective communication that has used a variety of tools and channels, from traditional media (new...Read more...
Benvenuto Benvenuti's tower of Calafuria, the visionary evocation of an emotion
The Calafuria watchtower suddenly appears among the rocks as one descends along the Aurelia in that wonderful stretch that, having left Livorno and passed the Antignano coastline, skirts the cliffs just below Montenero and leads toward the village of...Read more...
How do party programs talk about culture in the run-up to the September 25 elections?
Culture, it is well known, is not a campaign topic. And if it is not traditionally so in quieter periods than the one we are currently experiencing, let alone how much attention can be devoted to it in a campaign that the parties have had to prepare ...Read more...
All the sublime and beautiful in art: the Christ at the Sodom Column
The story behind Sodom's Christ at the Column , preserved at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, is curious and singular. It is a detached fresco: in ancient times it stood in the cloister of the convent of San Francesco in Siena, where the artist had...Read more...
When contemporary art invades ancient spaces
Anyone visiting the Doge's Palace in Venice until next Oct. 29 will not find in the Sala dello Scrutinio the works of Tintoretto, Andrea Vicentino, Pietro Liberi, Palma the Younger and the others who painted the splendors of the Serenissima on the la...Read more...
The mystery of the Madonna and Child by Bartolomeo Caporali, a piece of Mantegna culture in Umbria
When the wave of demanations that followed the Unification of Italy brought to the museums of Umbria a huge amount of works arriving en masse from the churches and convents of the territory, it is likely that animated discussions immediately arose am...Read more...
Continuing to rediscover Anselmo Bucci. Vittoriale's significant exhibition
A small volume published in 1943 preserves the faded memory of the visit that Anselmo Bucci reserved for the Vittoriale ten years earlier: it was printed by Giorgio Nicodemi, an art historian, a tireless contributor to Emporium, bound to Gabriele d'A...Read more...
Imitatio, tempus, vanitas. The art of Bertozzi & Casoni.
Among the factories on the industrious industrial outskirts of Imola, at the edge of an interminable sequence of cultivated fields that accompany the highway towards Forlì and the shores of Romagna, hides the factory that sees the birth of...Read more...
Piero di Cosimo's Magdalene, a lady in the guise of a saint
When she first reveals herself to the visitor to Palazzo Barberini, Piero di Cosimo's Magdalene appears as an image so startling, so unexpected, so modern that she does not even look like a work of the 15th century. And she is so real and ali...Read more...
This is where the Renaissance began. The exhibition for the 600th anniversary of Masaccio's Triptych of San Giovenale
The birth certificate of Renaissance painting is not to be sought, as one might imagine, within the walls of Florence, under Giotto's bell tower, in the shadow of Brunelleschi's dome. As far as we know, Florence was not the first recipient of...Read more...
The versatile originality of Grechetto: the Nativity of St. Luke in Genoa
"An alchemist capable of recreating, within his paintings, an alternative reality." This is how Giacomo Montanari defines one of the greatest champions of the Genoese seventeenth century, that Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known to all as "...Read more...
On the case of Trieste's museums. The real problem? The habits of the administrations
Those familiar with the administrative machinery that moves most of Italy's civic museums will not have been seized with excesses of astonishment upon reading the news of the alleged abolition of the position of "director of the Trieste Civic...Read more...
Guido Cagnacci. The senses and the spirit
Swollen salumeria tits, prominent nipples, skin full of buttery health: these are some of the images that Arbasino, in Fratelli d'Italia, associates with the procubescent, seductive and buxom women who populate in large numbers the painting...Read more...
Interview with Marco Pierini: "Here is the new National Gallery of Umbria."
After exactly one year of work, the National Gallery of Umbria reopens to the public on July 1, 2022 with a totally renovated layout, and many new features some of which are extremely original and innovative (at this link the article with det...Read more...
Atalanta and Hippomenes, a manifesto of beauty by Guido Reni
A great expert on things Emilian of the seventeenth century which was, nomen omen, the great Andrea Emiliani, wrote that one has long misunderstood the so-called "taste of the Bolognese," one has considered it harmony that almost exceeded aca...Read more...
This is why the divine Michelangelo was named after him. A suggestion with Giuliano Amidei's triptych.
We are in the sanctum sanctorum, I am told as soon as one enters the last room of the Palazzo del Podestà of Caprese, a severe and square stone building over which the shadows of the mountains of the Valtiberina stretch. Here, in this bare...Read more...
Giorgio Belloni's La Mareggiata, a verista with the soul of a poet
He was a painter from Lombardy, Giorgio Belloni: born in Codogno, studied at the Brera Academy following Giuseppe Bertini and admiring Filippo Carcano, an early part of his career spent between Milan and the Veneto. How much further one coul...Read more...
The mysterious, slow and crazy theater of Wainer Vaccari
The shadow of an intimate and deep mystery envelops Wainer Vaccari's most recent works. Not that the Modenese artist in the past had accustomed the public to works more agile to probe: Since the beginning of his career, on which has always we...Read more...
The Many Souls from Futurist Aeropainting. The exhibition at the Labyrinth of the Masone
The exhibition on Futurist aeropainting that is on view until July 3 at the Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato has explicit and declared aims of completeness: Dall'alto. Aeropittura futurista (From Above. Futurist Aeropainting), the exhi...Read more...
Erasing peace to spread its seeds. Pacem in Terris by Emilio Isgrò
John XXII was a man who saw the future. And he saw it clear and bright, alive and palpable in the radiance of a universal order reflected in the intentions and actions of the human beings who will inhabit the earth. A future where everywhere...Read more...
Axel Hémery: "an honor to direct the National Art Gallery of Siena. Here's what we're going to do from now on."
Axel Hémery has been the new director of Siena's Pinacoteca Nazionale since March, the first since the Siena museum was granted autonomy. French, born in 1964, an art historian, he was director of the Musée des Augustins in To...Read more...
Giovan Francesco Caroto, a Holy Family between Leonardo and Michelangelo
It could be said that there was not just one Giovan Francesco Caroto: there were as many as the genres with which he tried his hand, the artists he approached, the experiences he gained during his many travels. Artist, in many ways, not so n...Read more...
Tomoko Nagao's art between micropop and micropolitics
There was a discussion one day among friends, in front of some works by Tomoko Nagao, a Japanese artist born in Nagoya but who has been living and working in Milan for years, about what had been, for Japanese figurative culture, the most evi...Read more...
Superbaroque in Rome. The Thousand Faces of the Seventeenth-Century Genoese at the Scuderie del Quirinale
Those who habitually frequent Genoa and are familiar with its treasures will certainly feel an unusual sensation as soon as they enter the Scuderie del Quirinale to immerse themselves in the Genoese Superbarocco, as per the title of the exhib...Read more...
Turin, exceptional discovery: found the missing part of the Sabauda Sounder
It is indeed an exceptional discovery that has been announced by the Caretto & Occhinegro Gallery in Turin: the antiquarians Massimiliano Caretto and Francesco Occhinegro have in fact made public the discovery of the Concerto by Antivedut...Read more...
Not just Museum Night. We open museums at night all the time, all year round!
It is not so much the numbers that give an idea of the phenomenon: it is people's comments that give us the clearest evidence of what Museum Night was. True, there are the "record-breaking" figures, to use an expression dear to those who are...Read more...
Pino Pascali's Great Reptile, the dinosaur that invites us not to take ourselves too seriously
It is hard to think that one of the works of art that has become a symbol of the twentieth century in Livorno, Pino Pascali's Great Reptile , spent part of its existence buried in a basement. The City of Livorno had purchased it in 1967, a...Read more...
Looking for the origins of Vasily Kandinsky's inspiration. The exhibition in Rovigo
In the last twenty years alone, nine exhibitions dedicated in various ways to Vasily Kandinsky have been counted in Italy, without mentioning the exhibition occasions built with his multiples, or those where the name of the great abstractioni...Read more...
The Adoration of the Magi by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, a Genoese between Van Dyck and Stomer
In the dense group of artists who gave life and form to the Genoese Baroque, one of the most reposed positions today, although it need not have been so in his time, is that occupied by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, an artist known above all fo...Read more...
The self-righteous Venice Biennale. A milk of dreams that looks to the past
Among the more than four hundred works that give body to The Milk of Dreams, the international exhibition of the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, there is one that sums up all its contradictions: one encounters it shortly after the halfway poin...Read more...
Giuseppe Cominetti's Conquerors of the Sun, a hymn to work and hope
"That madman of a Cominetti whom in his youth no sage would have wanted for a friend" That artist "who dispersed in the obscure pages of little newspapers of the time, which no art magazine has handed down." This is how Giovanni Carandente, c...Read more...
Tosatti and Viola's Italian Pavilion, perfect merry-go-round of fake fireflies and high fashion
A frequent, continuous and melancholy sense of the sublime pervades the pages of Ermanno Rea's Dismissione, the novel that narrates the dismantling of Ilva di Bagnoli from the point of view of the technician in charge of waiting for the succe...Read more...
But what is the point of moving the Fourth Estate to Florence to celebrate May 1?
The best comment is from a user of Florence Mayor Dario Nardella's Facebook page: refrain from any rhetoric about workers' struggles, and simply state the time and place of the exhibition with times, ticket costs and possible reductions. On t...Read more...
Padua, the exhibition Dai Romantici a Segantini is a disaster and a missed opportunity
To identify the exhibitions curated by Marco Goldin, the art historian-entrepreneur who for years has been grinding out thousands of visitors with his Linea d'Ombra exhibitions, a few years ago a very effective term was coined, "panettone exh...Read more...
Modern painter, fine intellectual and talent scout. Vittore Grubicy on display in Livorno
There has been a thread linking Livorno to Vittore Grubicy de Dragon for more than a hundred years, and it can perhaps be said that today there is no city that more than the Tuscan port is locked in such a strong relationship with the great point...Read more...
That resurrected Christ of Marco Basaiti ... sitting around.
It is quite strange that a Renaissance painter depicts the risen Christ not standing, in a triumphant position, tall and imperious in his divine glory, but seated, in a pose that could be called everyday, almost humble. Yet this is how the V...Read more...
The achievements of a man who lived in the future. The exhibition on Lucio Fontana at the Magnani Rocca
To enter Lucio Fontana's creative process, his thoughts and ideas, to grasp the seductive complexity of his work, the theoretical lucidity that sustains the beauty of his works, the motivations behind the sculptures, the holes, the cuts. To be gu...Read more...
Manfredino di Alberto's San Michele, a bridge between Liguria and Tuscany in the Middle Ages
There is an important piece of Cimabuesque culture enclosed within the walls of the Museum of St. Augustine in Genoa. A detached fresco. The inscription at the base bears the name "Magister Manfredinus": it is a singular St. Michael painted in ...Read more...
Donatello Contemporary Always. About the Palazzo Strozzi and Bargello exhibition.
One could discuss for hours what Francesco Caglioti writes in the introduction to the catalog of his exhibition Donatello. The Renaissance, when he reiterates that art-historical research tends increasingly to move beyond the approach linked ...Read more...
"La Madonnina quasi persiana" by Vitale degli Equi at the Poldi Pezzoli in Milan.
Roberto Longhi had called it "the almost Persian Madonnina who seems to be waiting to give the Child a lesson in the art of perfumes." Vitale degli Equi's Madonna and Child is indeed one of the most delightful objects in the Poldi Pezzoli Mus...Read more...
Women in 16th-century Venice, according to Titian and beyond. The exhibition at the Royal Palace
There is good news and bad news that prepares visitors for their itinerary through the halls of Titian and the Image of Women in Sixteenth-Century Venice, the exhibition that, through works of considerable relevance (not only by Titian: there is ...Read more...
"This is what the situation is like at the National Galleries of the Arts in Lviv."
The war in Ukraine at the moment is relatively far from Lviv (Lviv), a city close to the border with Poland, currently a kind of refuge for those leaving the cities most affected by the conflict. Lviv is also home to one of the country's most impor...Read more...
Who was Federico Zeri. Milan's fine exhibition to learn about the great connoisseur
On February 15, 1997, Federico Zeri wrote a letter to the collector who had purchased a splendid Rape of the Sabine Women, assigned to Sebastiano Ricci in an auction at Sotheby's in Munich some time earlier. "The painting examined here," co...Read more...
No to censorship on Russian culture. Deleting Dostoevsky is grotesque
It is this morning's news that the University of Milano-Bicocca has been caught up in the temptation not to have people talk about Russian culture: the writer Paolo Nori, a great expert on Russian literature, on his Instagram page, in a broke...Read more...
Domenico Beccafumi's diverse Siena: the Trinity at the origins of Mannerism
It is a different Siena, that of Domenico Beccafumi. It is not the international and embattled Siena of the fourteenth century, the elegant and flowery Siena of the gilded painters from Guido and Duccio onward, the Siena that achieved that un...Read more...
Three myths to dispel about the Renaissance (of the trivializations of Cecilia Alemani and Chiara Valerio)
It will be a Venice Biennale "against the Renaissance," anticipates Chiara Valerio, who will sign one of the essays in the catalog of the international exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani. That is, it will try to propose to the visitor a ...Read more...
A Van Dyck in a small village in Liguria. The Crucifix of San Michele di Pagana
Silence is the element that more than any other illuminates the soul of San Michele di Pagana, a village of a few houses guarding a small landing place hidden among the pines and palm trees, along the short road from Rapallo to Santa Margheri...Read more...
Abolish the Green Pass starting with museums, exhibitions and cultural venues
At last it seems to be no longer a forbidden topic to talk about the abolition of the Green Pass, and in this sense the latest openings of the members of the Technical-Scientific Committee and even some of the most televised scientists give h...Read more...
The exhibition on Pietro Paolini and the painters of light: Lucca rediscovers its Caravaggesque painters
1968 was a year of supreme importance for the city of Lucca: the National Museum of Villa Guinigi, acquired by the state twenty years earlier and subjected for two decades to the necessary restoration and arrangement of the collections, opened it...Read more...
The saints who covered the triptych: Carlo Braccesco at the Diocesan Museum of Spezia
In the small and surprising Diocesan Museum of La Spezia, in what was once the nave of the ancient oratory of San Bernardino and is now the central room of the collection, a large glass case holds two fragments of canvas: they are wispy, fade...Read more...
Carlo Levi and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, a cultural and political friendship. The exhibition in Lucca
One of the lesser-known merits among the many that can be attributed to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti is that he was among the first, if not the first, to make use of a historiographical method for a living artist. It happened in the immediate postwar ...Read more...
Dismembering the Carrara Marble Museum: a project of cultural terraplatters. Here's why
It had already happened this summer in Rome, when Carlo Calenda wanted to get his hands on the Capitoline Museums, with the idea of dismembering them to make a mega-museum of only Roman antiquities by bringing together the collections of seve...Read more...
The Grand Tour, Dreaming of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. The exhibition in Milan
The expression "Grand Tour" first appeared in 1670, in the writing of an English Catholic priest, Richard Lassels, who that year published a book in Paris, The Voyage of Italy, in which the cities, monuments, and buildings seen during a trip ...Read more...
"Research-based innovation and entertainment: this is what Italian cultural institutions need." Umberto Pastore speaks
Operational since January 2021, one year after its establishment Creation has become one of the most interesting Italian entrepreneurial realities in the field of services for culture and cultural heritage: conceived by a group of partners wi...Read more...
Verrocchio's "spectacular" Madonna of Santa Maria Nuova
It took Verrocchio several years to reach the degree of technical perfection of the Madonna of Santa Maria Nuova, an exceptional terracotta relief that the public can admire today at the Bargello National Museum. And it took the world four ce...Read more...
Are sponsor logos to be censored? No: let's strike a balance
Can one speak of a city for sale if, at the end of a light show that uses a monument as a screen for projections, one witnesses for a few seconds the passage of the logo of those who paid for that show? The fact is well known: a lively contro...Read more...
Badiucao, the dissident Chinese artist, speaks: 'let's go back to making art connected to people'
He calls himself "Badiucao," but no one knows his name. He is the Chinese artist who defies censorship by the government of China, which is why he is forced to live in Australia, in exile. Until Feb. 13, 2022, he is the protagonist of the exh...Read more...
Plautilla Bricci, the first female architect in history: what the exhibition in Rome looks like
To get an idea of how difficult it was in the seventeenth century for a woman to rise to the highest echelons of art, one need only scroll through the Catalogue of the Academicians of San Luca compiled by Giuseppe Ghezzi in the late seventeen...Read more...
Caravaggio, Artemisia and the Others. Judith Revolution: the exhibition in Rome
Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi: two names that, if placed at the head of the title of any exhibition review, would probably suffice alone to guarantee its success. And so it would seem to be for Caravaggio and Artemisia. The Challenge o...Read more...
Statue of a woman in Prato della Valle in Padua: why not? Three possible names
Can one add the statue of a woman in Prato della Valle in Padua, the city's marvelous secular pantheon, where, however, the monuments, with the exception of the small bust of Gaspara Stampa flanking Andrea Briosco's statue, celebrate exclusiv...Read more...
Light that makes the finite visible. The Gleam of Claudio Olivieri
With his painting, Claudio Olivieri sought to give form to the invisible. One could summarize in this way, certainly trivializing but giving back a glaring and effective image, much of the research of the great Roman artist by birth, Mantuan by...Read more...
Here are the artists to bet on. Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo speaks.
President of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is one of the leading figures in Italian contemporary art: a patron who is very attentive to Italian and international art scenarios, in the foundation...Read more...
Is the St. John the Baptist on display in Camaiore by Caravaggio?
Naples, July 29, 1610. Deodato Gentile, bishop of Caserta, writes a letter to Cardinal Scipione Borghese informing him that Michelangelo Merisi, the Caravaggio, has died at Porto Ercole, "where he fell ill and left his life." The "felluca" th...Read more...
This is why the discovery of the tomb of the prince of Corinaldo is exceptional
Until Jan. 30, 2022, the Pinacoteca Comunale "Claudio Ridolfi" (Municipal Art Gallery) in Corinaldo (Ancona) is hosting the exhibition The Treasure Found. The Tomb of the Prince of Corinaldo, an exhibition that recounts the important archaeologic...Read more...
Synthesis of Venus in an exhibition of 46 works. Nature, shadow and beauty at Palazzo Te
Mnemosyne was the name of the Greek goddess of memory. Aby Warburg, who pronounced it the Greek way, with the accent on the ipsilon, had it installed, in huge Greek characters, at the entrance to his library in Hamburg. More importantly, he had...Read more...
Orazio Riminaldi's study for the Assumption, one of the most beautiful faces of the seventeenth century
It is not taken for granted that the public of museums and exhibitions dwells at length on the preparatory studies of a work, on sketches, drawings, models, on everything that the artist elaborated before arriving at the finished product. We ar...Read more...
Equals and Unequals: the scenarios of Italian art in an unmissable exhibition in Carrara
The deep cultural gloom that has enveloped Carrara for too long is occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning coming from a well-defined source: the 18th-century rooms of Vôtre at the Palazzo del Medico, at the moment the only space ...Read more...
"The ninth edition of Flashback? Exciting!" Stefania Poddighe and Ginevra Pucci speak.
Edition number IX of Flashback, Turin's ancient and contemporary art fair, was held this year from November 4 to 7, in a new venue, the former Dogali Barracks, but as always with a selection of high-quality exhibitors. The numbers exceeded ex...Read more...
Ludovico Mazzolino's Holy Family, between monkeys and classical architecture
For Giovanni Morelli, Ludovico Mazzolino was "der Glühwurm unter den Malern," as he called him in his Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei: the "firefly of painters." The reason why is quickly said: because of his "wonde...Read more...
Simone Verde: "Pilotta, the time for reconstruction is coming to an end: let's start the time for research"
Four years into his tenure as director of the Complesso della Pilotta in Parma, Simone Verde takes stock of the main activities of the past few months, which are leading toward the end of construction and into a new phase for the museum: that...Read more...
How is it possible that a Bassano masterpiece that was in Italy was bought by the Getty?
From the Facebook group Le Connoisseur, always diligent and a source of interesting ideas, comes, on the part of administrator Lorenzo Barbato, a report of a piece of news that has not been talked about in Italy and that has instead obtained ...Read more...
A saint, an "elegant and learned" woman: Barbara Longhi and her Catherine of Alexandria
In a beautiful mural that occupies one wall of the refectory of what was once the convent of the Camaldolese monks of Ravenna, now home to the Classense Library, is painted the Gospel episode of the Marriage at Cana, the work of the Ravenna-b...Read more...
Inferno at the Scuderie del Quirinale, perhaps the most powerful and visionary exhibition in recent years
In one of his most recent books, L'hiver de la culture, Jean Clair recalled a visit to the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in Paris, in the company of a young Canadian art historian, a museum curator, who was crossing the Atlantic fo...Read more...
Growth, inclusion, openness. What the Tridentine Diocesan Museum has been in recent years.
As we wait to see what the Tridentine Diocesan Museum will look like under the new director, economist Michele Andreaus, it is interesting to turn the lights back on the path the Trent institution has taken in recent years, for several reason...Read more...
When Giottesque culture arrived in Mantua. The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine
It is difficult, with the Renaissance splendors that invade the collective imagination whenever one thinks of the arts in Mantua, to imagine that the city had a fruitful artistic life even before the arrival of the various Mantegna, Leon Bat...Read more...
Giotto, Dante and Cimabue arrive on the Gulf of Poets. Lia Museum exhibition.
Lunigiana, as is well known, is a land dotted with Dante's traces, albeit fragmentary and with few certain data. We do know for sure that Dante, on the morning of October 6, 1306, was in Sarzana, in Piazza della Calcandola, today's Piazza de...Read more...
What the exhibitions of the future will look like: more inclusive, digital and environmentally conscious. Interview with Bernadine Wieder
What will exhibitions look like in the future? Big blockbuster exhibitions again? Small thematic insights? How much will immersiveness count? Will exhibitions know how to integrate digital, respect multiple points of view, take into account the n...Read more...
An intimate and human Dante. The admirable vision" exhibition at the Bargello Museum in Florence.
A portrait filled with "sensitivity, kindness, love, and a demeanor that breathes the spirit of the Vita Nova." These are the words that Mary Shelley, in 1844, used to comment on the fresco with the portrait of Dante Alighieri that had recent...Read more...
Among the mountains of Trentino, an enigmatic Last Supper: Ferdinando Valdambrini in Tiarno di Sotto
Tiarno di Sotto is a quiet hamlet of just a few houses nestled among the meadows of the Ledro valley, in that part of Trentino where the inhabitants' speech has the narrow, closed, sharp sounds of the dialects of the Lombard valleys. Together...Read more...
Michele Chiossi: "Finally, art has also restarted. But we need to work harder and better."
With Art Week in Milan, we can officially say that the contemporary art world is back in full swing, live. Among theartists in pole position is Michele Chiossi (Lucca, 1970), one of the most well-known and interesting names in contemporary marb...Read more...
John Anthony Cybei at last: the first monographic exhibition of the great forgotten sculptor
After years of waiting, Carrara finally welcomes the first monographic exhibition on Giovanni Antonio Cybei (Carrara, 1706 - 1784), one of the greatest artists the city has produced, and who had never before been able to boast of an exhibition ...Read more...
Faith Galicia, the first time of the "admirable pittoressa," on display in Trent
The story of Fede Galizia, wrote Flavio Caroli in the most important monograph dedicated to the Lombard painter of Trentino origins, possesses "a wholly singular importance, which it would be improper not to define as avant-garde throughout...Read more...
Antonio Addamiano: "Italian art has great potential, like fashion. But we don't exploit it."
With the return of art fairs in attendance, we are back to discussing the market landscape and the Italian scene. Among the protagonists of recent times is certainly Milan's Dep Art Gallery, among the most active even during the pandemic and ready ...Read more...
Giampaolo Abbondio: "in Italy we have excellent contemporary artists: let's support them"
Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio is one of the most active galleries in recent months: bucking the market trends, it has recently moved its headquarters to Todi, has just returned from Miart (the first fair in attendance in Europe since the beginn...Read more...
Alessandro Tiarini's Rinaldo e Armida: a translation in pictures by Torquato Tasso
It is difficult to say which seventeenth-century painter was best able to translate into images the verses of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata . If, however, one were to point to the artist who most passionately approached Tasso's univer...Read more...
Bernardo Strozzi's Miracle of San Diego: one of the artist's "happiest creations"
The circumstances of the "discovery" of the Miracle of St. Diego, a painting that ranks among the most unusual and valuable that Bernardo Strozzi's inspiration ever produced, are at least fortuitous. It was the art historian Gustavo Frizzoni ...Read more...
Between wind, saltiness and thoughts. The Libecciata of Giovanni Fattori
Curzio Malaparte, in his Maledetti toscani, said that the libeccio is not a home wind. It is the humid, hot wind that comes from the southwest: it blows especially in summer, rises suddenly, lashing the coast with violent gusts that cut the...Read more...
From Kabul speaks the director of the National Museum of Afghanistan: "we are safe but there is a lot of uncertainty"
Exclusive interview by Windows on Art. Last August 15, after 20 years, Afghanistan returned under the control of the Taliban, who entered Kabul that very day. The world now fears that there could be a repeat of the scenes of destruction and looti...Read more...
Calenda deal with economics and leave museology alone. 10 reasons against his mega-museum
Transforming the Capitoline Museums into a large museum of the history of Rome that would bring together the collections of the various institutes that today preserve Roman antiquities in the capital (National Roman Museum, Museum of Romana, Ce...Read more...
Italian art? We are at an all-time low. Gian Enzo Sperone speaks.
A life between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, a gallery that has been a landmark in world art for decades, a collector who has collected art from every era, from archaeological finds to gold backgrounds, from great seventeenth-century p...Read more...
A summit of modernity by Orazio Gentileschi: the Vision of Francesca Romana
There are two hagiographies of St. Frances Romana that narrate a precise episode, which occurred on September 6, 1431, when the Roman mystic, born Francesca Bussa de' Leoni, was sixty-seven years old: while listening to Mass in the church of Sa...Read more...
Ludovico Brea's Ascension: the golden triumph of the Ligurian Renaissance
Two and a half meters of panel filled and overflowing with gold, refined colors, and skillfully calculated harmonies. Ludovico Brea'sAscension will bring to the mind of some the balanced balances of a Piero della Francesca, to the memories of...Read more...
Looking at the pandemic through a cover. 49 Italian artists on display in Massa
"The constraints of confinement have led each of us to question our lifestyles, our true needs, our aspirations, repressed in those who suffer a closed condition between home and work, forgotten in those who enjoy a less enslaved life, and masked g...Read more...
A beach that is colored with sound. Moses Levy's "Tidal Wave."
There are paintings to be heard as well as seen: paintings that have such evocative power that they lead us to imagine the voices and noises of what the painter has decided to show us on canvas. The synaesthetic power of Moses Levy's painting...Read more...
How the state let a masterpiece by Parmigianino slip under its nose
The opportunity was one that rarely happens: the most important work in private hands by one of the greatest artists in Italian art history put on the market at a more than affordable price. Last July 8, at Christie's Old Masters Evening Sale, Pa...Read more...
Beato Angelico's Annunciation of Cortona: divine light reflecting on earth
What place does Beato Angelico occupy in the development of Italian art? Pavel Pavlovič Muratov asked that question in 1929. And it is a question to which many scholars, more or less explicitly, have attempted to give an answer, tr...Read more...
Domenico Fiasella's St. Lazarus: a masterpiece of "Caravaggism revisited" to drive out the plague
In that thin strip of plain on the border between Tuscany and Liguria, squeezed between the hills on one side and the sea on the other, the traveler driving along the Aurelia moving toward Sarzana will notice at a certain point, among the bus...Read more...
The Ladies of Art in Milan: merits and limitations of the exhibition on women artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
By a fortuitous coincidence, the rich exhibition Le Signore dell'arte, the show with which Palazzo Reale in Milan composes a fragrant anthology of women's painting between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falls exactly fifty years after the p...Read more...
A delicate Umbrian artist of the 14th century: the Crucifixion of the Master of Fossa
One cannot say one has known Umbria without having seen Umbrian painting. And similarly, it is difficult to approach Umbrian painting without ever having been to the region: there are perhaps few areas in Italy where the relationship between ...Read more...
Placers at the museum. Taranto: when the museum chases the influencer, and does it badly
"Placemakers in a modern, social version" at the museum. So read the press release of the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto (MArTA), later retracted, presenting to the public the Bellezze al museo initiative, a tour by the entrepreneu...Read more...
"A healthy and serene art. Hector Titus' July
In the 1894 guide to the Esposizioni Riunite in Milan, it could be read that Ettore Tito's paintings were not capable of drawing the public's attention d' embl&e acute;e: "they are not large in size, nor are they of new or eccentric subject m...Read more...
Dante in Forli, an exhibition that is like an encyclopedia on Dante in art history
There is a rather precise moment in the course of history when it is possible to identify the prodromes of the construction of today's Dante myth. The Dante cult, in other words, has a place and a date of birth, namely late 18th-century Engla...Read more...
A violent struggle that is almost a dance. The Rape of the Sabine Women by Girolamo Mirola
We know very little about Girolamo Mirola, and one of the few certainties about him is his very close proximity to that great painter who was a kind of his alter ego, the Parma-born Jacopo Zanguidi, known as Bertoja: in recent art historiogra...Read more...
The Aesthetics of the Clumsy. Rome's Porchetta, Turin's Bull, Carrara's Vanity.
Per the Treccani dictionary, the adjective "clumsy" means "anything that shows clumsiness, timidity, lack of ease," or can refer to anything that is "lacking in grace, elegance, harmony, such that it is almost ridiculous." Clumsy is, in essen...Read more...
Guido Cagnacci's Magdalene Taken to Heaven: the flesh and the spirit
We know a good part of the biographical story of Guido Cagnacci, the great Romagna artist, thanks to a nucleus of letters and documents collected in the mid-18th century by a Rimini painter, Giovanni Battista Costa, who called Cagnacci an "excellen...Read more...
To pander to "decorum" fixation, Brunelleschi's churchyard is defaced in Santo Spirito
It is well known that the policies of decorum so dear to bourgeois respectability have produced, over the years, ircocervi that should be monstrous to anyone who does not yet want to surrender to the idea that our cities should be the mirror of the...Read more...
Silvestro Lega's Pergola: the Macchiaioli poetry of tranquility
It is curious to know that today we refer to Silvestro Lega's best-known masterpiece with a title that its author never heard of in his entire life. And it is even surprising to realize that we know nothing about the first fifty years of this...Read more...
A world 27 cm high: the predella of the Griffoni Polyptych, a masterpiece by Ercole de' Roberti
If one were to take a few minutes in a museum or church to observe the typical behavior of the public in front of a polyptych, one would find that there is a large number of visitors who pay little attention to the predella, observe it with a...Read more...
Rolli Days: how to make people understand the value of heritage to our lives. Giacomo Montanari speaks
Rolli Days in Genoa, the event that twice a year (in spring and fall) opens for two days to the public the doors of the main historical palaces of Genoa, a UNESCO World Heritage Unesco World Heritage Site (with special events, extraordinary...Read more...
A face impossible to forget. Tanzio da Varallo's David, between Testori and Rimbaud.
Giovanni Testori was right: it is impossible to forget the faces of Tanzio da Varallo's two Davids . Especially of the less ancient one, the very blond teenager that Tanzio painted around 1625, of the two the one with the more ephebic face: "...Read more...
This is how Dante was first condemned and then rehabilitated. The Bargello Museum's exhibition
An exhibition that sets out to reknit the threads between Dante Alighieri and Florence, reconstructing the process of reappropriation to which the poet was subjected in the years following his death, and following the dissemination of his wri...Read more...
Those cuts that make us venture into the real. On the Expectations of Lucio Fontana
There is one element of Lucio Fontana that can put everyone in agreement, one element of his art that perhaps even his increasingly scattered detractors might be ready to acknowledge: the great theoretical lucidity that has always motivated every s...Read more...
When a chicken becomes an innovative work of art. Interview with Koen Vanmechelen
Koen Vanmechelen (Sint-Truiden, 1965), one of the leading contemporary Belgian artists with several major exhibitions around the world to his credit, has been pursuing the unique project The Cosmopolitan Chicken Projectsince 1999 : it is a proj...Read more...
Abolish mandatory reservations on holidays for museums
Museums continue to be one of the places where there is the least risk of Covid-19 infection: we have been saying this on these pages since April of last year, and the fact that no museum has so far proved to be a place where the infection ha...Read more...
A brutal, verist Renaissance. Donatello's Magdalene
Within the scientifically and rationally defined space of Renaissance perspective throbs the restless soul of man with all its contradictions, weaknesses, and opposites. The reading that Massimo Cacciari offers of fifteenth-century Humanism i...Read more...
Gianfranco Ferroni's waste: the other side of Pop Art
In Gianfranco Ferroni's art, there is a before and there is an after. And the watershed is the 1968 Venice Biennale. It is June 18, the day when the preview of the great international exhibition opens: in St. Mark's Square, which is not yet a...Read more...
"Almost as unbelievable as a church painting." Simon Vouet and his Saint Francis Tempted
Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1921, the physiologist Mariano Luigi Patrizi published a booklet that attempted a psychological reconstruction of Caravaggio's personality from his works: it was entitled Un pittore criminale (A Criminal Painte...Read more...
Cardelli & Fontana: "online and new ways of working: this is how we resisted Covid"
How has Covid's pandemic year been for a small- to medium-sized gallery? What were the innovations? How has online helped? We asked the historic Cardelli & Fontana Gallery in Sarzana, in business since 1980. Here are the answers from the ...Read more...
Imbalances and culture serving tourism: Recovery Plan, more could have been done
A little more than six and a half billion euros is a figure of substantial proportions for the culture sector: the 6.675 billion that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRP) will make available to culture corresponds to a little more ...Read more...
Giorgio Kienerk's Silence as a response to endure the hardships of reality
"In ancient times religions and philosophies did not live except by silence: they knew and observed the necessity of silence. Those that shunned that necessity, those were always misunderstood deformed profaned disheartened." In his Secret Bo...Read more...
Why it is wrong to reduce everything to closers vs. openers. The example of culture
Even among those involved in culture there is perceived, in these hours, a strong hostility to the April 26 reopenings, seen from many quarters as a cession of the government to the "aperturist right" (I quote Tomaso Montanari). I believe tha...Read more...
When Sebastiano del Piombo allied with Michelangelo for a masterpiece: the Pieta of Viterbo
The Albertina in Vienna preserves a drawing, widely attributed to Michelangelo, with some studies of intertwined hands: in the exact center of the sheet, well detached from everything else, stands a male torso, with arms folded and hands join...Read more...
Ecce Homo, Antonio Vannugli: "I have strong doubts that it is a Caravaggio painting."
In recent days, several scholars have been very vocal about the possible Caravaggesque autography of an Ecce Homo that was about to go to auction in Madrid at the Ansorena house. However, there are also those who maintain a much more cautious...Read more...
Joseph Mentessi's "Sad Vision": the secular ordeal of forgotten workers
Bava Beccaris' savage cannons had raged with senseless brutality on the workers who had taken to the streets of Milan to demonstrate and protest against the rising price of bread. The general's bloody artillery had left dozens dead and hundre...Read more...
Caravaggio, Rossella Vodret: "here's why this Ecce Homo could be his"
It is one of the most important discoveries of recent times: theEcce Homo that was about to go to auction in Madrid at Ansorena (story here) and was blocked before the sale because it was recognized by several scholars as a possible autograph b...Read more...
The Christ of Santi di Tito who rose twice
There are actually two resurrections to be admired in the superb masterpiece that Santi di Tito painted for the Medici altar in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, the place where the panel is still preserved today. The first is the subj...Read more...
A poem by Valentino Zeichen for Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation.
Literary critics have never been particularly tender with Storia dell'arte italiana in poesia, the anthology that, in 1990, Plinio Perilli assembled in an attempt to compile a history of art in verse, either with poems taken from already publ...Read more...
Interview with Giulio Paolini: "the art of the past is not yet and will never be past"
Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) is the protagonist of a new exhibition at the Alfonso Artiaco Gallery in Naples: titled Fuori quadro, the show exhibits eight works, four of which were made for the occasion, along with several previously unpublis...Read more...
A garland of primroses in stone: the Spring of Benedetto Antelami
The image of spring, in Benedetto Antelami's sculpture, takes the form of an elegant, somewhat haughty young woman, dressed in a long tunic cinched at the waist by a leather girdle, and on her shoulders a cloak that defends her from the last ...Read more...
When art is Instagram-friendly. JR and institutional street art at Palazzo Strozzi
"L'histoire de l'art depuis cent ans est l'histoire de ce qui est photographiable," the history of art of the last hundred years is the history of what is photographable. André Malraux said this in his 1947 Le Musée imaginaire, and his ...Read more...
Raphael according to Roberto Longhi. From early iconoclasm to reevaluation.
The recently concluded five-hundredth anniversary of Raphael has not been short of opportunities to bring to the public's attention even the critical fortune that the Urbino, for centuries, has known almost interrupted, and in this sense ...Read more...
That gardener who is actually a farmer: Van Gogh's "Italian" masterpiece
There are precise reasons why there are only three works by Vincent van Gogh in Italian public collections: the Gardener and theArlesian in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and the Breton Women in the Galleria ...Read more...
Love, death and flowers. The brevity of life according to Genovesino
Luigi Lanzi wrote, in his Storia pittorica d'Italia (Pictorial History of Italy), that Genovesino succeeded in all themes, but especially in the "most horrific" ones. It is difficult to blame the abbot when one admires certain vanitas by the Liguri...Read more...
The wood gatherers who did not know they gave birth to the modern Italian landscape
In 1919, a 31-year-old Giorgio De Chirico published in Valori Plastici a ferocious account of his visit to what is now the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. For the young painter, it was probably a distressing and masochistic e...Read more...
German, young, competent, knowledgeable. On the appointment of Gabriel Zuchtriegel to Pompeii.
I cannot recall a more controversial appointment of director of a cultural site than the one that invested Gabriel Zuchtriegel with the role of director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. I remember, of course, equally heated debates when the...Read more...
"The most beautiful panel by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in existence": the Madonna of Milk in Siena
It was a midwinter day in 1879 when Charles Fairfax Murray entered the church of San Francesco in Siena with the specific intention of going to see a work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti that was kept there, in the chapel of the Archbishop's Seminary....Read more...
The demise of a ruling class: the Genoese "Detention" of Alessandro Magnasco
Don't be fooled by the title. There is little that is lighthearted or delightful about that Trattenimento in un giardino di Albaro that stands out in Room 23 of Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, Ga: even a painting that seemingly guides us among the am...Read more...
Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The conquest of the fourth dimension
To fully understand the revolutionary scope of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Umberto Boccioni's masterpiece, one might start with Lucio Fontana and his Technical Manifesto of Spatialism: "Futurism adopts movement as its principle and only ...Read more...
Edith Gabrielli (Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia): we will do organic work on the two museums
Edith Gabrielli has been the first director since September of the new autonomous museum in Rome that unites the Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia. These are two institutes Gabrielli knows very well, since they were part of the Polo Museale ...Read more...
Stefano L'Occaso (Ducal Palace Mantua): "restoration and new layouts: what we're going to do to the museum."
Stefano L'Occaso has been the new director of the Ducal Palace in Mantua since November, having won the international competition that named him as Peter Assmann's successor. L'Occaso, a Roman but Mantuan by adoption (he has in fact been in...Read more...
A masterpiece of sweetness and minuteness: Pinturicchio's Madonna of Peace
Guido Piovene, perhaps the greatest of Italian travel writers, described the Madonna of Peace as "the best picture painted by Pinturicchio." The choice is a tough one: Bernardino di Betto was a sublime artist; it is difficult to say which of the ...Read more...
Cioni Carpi and Gianni Melotti. Experimentations between photography and language
The 1980 Venice Biennial catalog inserts Cioni Carpi (Eugenio Carpi de' Resmini; Milan, 1923 - 2011) in a group of artists who "have worked since the late 1960s with insistence on the media of large-scale communication, experimenting with a d...Read more...
Francesca Cappelletti (Borghese Gallery): 'our museum must be a living organism'
Art historian Francesca Cappelletti was appointed in September as the new director of the Borghese Gallery, and took office in her role a few weeks ago. Cappelletti was already a member of the Gallery's scientific committee and has a long exp...Read more...
Pessimism and Optimism: the futurist clash of two forces in Giacomo Balla's masterpiece
Contrary to what one might at first think, there is no elaborate philosophical framework underlying Pessimism and Optimism, the masterpiece to which Giacomo Balla devoted at least five years of research. There is, however, a firm intention: t...Read more...
ArtReview's Power 100: aesthetics sacrificed in the name of morality
Je est un autre. "I am another": this was what a 16-year-old Rimbaud wrote in the intense days of the Paris Commune, in two letters sent one to Izimbard and one to Demeny, to assert the need for a poetry that would free itself from the excesses o...Read more...
Between Venice and Northern Europe: Andrea Previtali's Crucifixion at the Gallerie dellAccademia
"Hilly country with a sunken sky" is the phrase that concludes the laconic card reserved for Andrea Previtali's Crucifixion in the catalog of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice compiled by Luigi Serra in 1914. The landscape, in that card, ...Read more...
A Holy Family by the "Caravaggio of Verona": the mysterious Pietro Bernardi
Pietro Bernardi is an elusive artist. We know little more than nothing about him: "always mysterious and poorly documented," art historian Sergio Marinelli called him in a 2016 essay. He was active in Verona for a few years at the turn of the...Read more...
Not just Venice. Why it is bad to keep museums closed, why they should be opened, how we can do it
According to a widespread and ingrained prejudice, museums are primarily machines for tourists. And it is probably on the basis of this prejudice that management and governance models have been imagined in the past that have tied economic flows t...Read more...
A hymn to light: Gaetano Previati's "Dance of the Hours," between music and poetry
A hymn to light: one could define Gaetano Previati's Dance of the Hours in this way, taking up a happy image by Domenico Tumiati. One of his most poetic, most mysterious, most elevated, most luminous, most triumphant masterpieces: the twelve Hours of...Read more...
An image of the mind. Luca Cambiaso's Madonna of the Candle, anticipator of Caravaggio?
On the road that leads to Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour is a great Genoese, Luca Cambiaso: it is his the refined Madonna of the Candle that one encounters in Room 2 of Palazzo Bianco in Genoa. It is probably the Moneglia-born painter's mo...Read more...
A train that runs and whistles like a comet: Fausto Melotti's Christmas Metrò
There is a train stopped at a subway station, we see it from the front. We can make out a figure inside the convoy, perhaps that of the driver. The crush typical of the days leading up to Christmas swarms the platform. Above the locomotive we...Read more...
Speaking of Alberto Angela: is prime-time disclosure too fictional?
To begin to reread Alberto Angela 's unprecedented program on Caravaggio, Tonight with Caravaggio, one could start from the mere numerical data, which speak, as usual, of a great triumph: on Wednesday, December 16, his program was the most watched ...Read more...
Masaccio and Masolino's St. Anna Metterza: two eras that meet in one table
It is difficult to find an art history textbook that does not reproduce the Sant'Anna Metterza, the Uffizi panel painting created, around 1424, by Masaccio together with Masolino da Panicale. And rare, too, are the works that can rival the ...Read more...
Can you explain (seriously) why malls open and museums don't?
What has happened to culture at this stage of the Covid pandemic? It was not mentioned in the council president's last press conference, it does not even receive simple words of comfort from Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, it was clubbed in the...Read more...
The Galatea of Elisabetta Sirani, the "heroine painter" who amazed her contemporaries
Elisabetta Sirani, a precious pearl of seventeenth-century painting, had the eccentric and refined habit of affixing her signature to the most unusual and unthinkable details of her graceful paintings: a row of buttons, the cuff of a shirt, the back ...Read more...
In the public debate, culture is an irrelevant issue. Can the paradigm be changed?
An AgCom report on the journalistic profession during the Covid emergency, released last week, clearly indicates that culture holds a singular record in theinformation sphere: it was the topic that, more than any other, journalists had to leave u...Read more...
Giampaolo Bertozzi (Bertozzi & Casoni), "In our art appears what man leaves behind in time."
The artistic duo Bertozzi & Casoni, composed of Giampaolo Bertozzi (Borgo Tossignano, 1957) and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni (Lugo, 1961), is one of the most important names in international contemporary ceramics. A fundamental characteristic of th...Read more...
We are like Pellizza da Volpedo's sheep: here is the mirror of life
"The illustrative symbol of man in his family and social organization is the flock," Folco Portinari wrote. "The flock is the people, whether one wishes to give it a negative or a positive sign." One can start from here to read one of Giuseppe Pelliz...Read more...
Art historical hoaxes: why the press falls for them, and how we can defend ourselves
Not infrequently, the press has given ample space to sensational hoaxes in the field of art history, often conferring media legitimacy on arrembant wafflers, self-styled experts completely unknown to the scientific community, and characters in sear...Read more...
The hard life of fishermen that becomes poetry: the scales at Bocca d'Arno by Francesco Gioli
In fishing jargon, they are called "scales" those large square nets that are attached to long poles equipped with pulleys, and then lowered into a river or the sea: one waits a few moments, and then pulls them up, trying to be fast in the hope th...Read more...
Franceschini: "digitization of our museums goes through Recovery Fund"
Where are we with the digitization of museums and cultural heritage? The closures that have affected cultural venues from March to the present have forced a rapid acceleration of ongoing processes, and new projects are in the pipeline to make our...Read more...
Our Lady of Simon of the Crucifixes and a flight of fancy between the pages of Marco Santagata
The frescoes around which the entire story of the novel that won Marco Santagata the Campiello Prize in 2003, Il maestro dei santi pallidi, really exist. They decorate two small mountain churches in the Apennines of Modena: the figures in the ora...Read more...
The mental world of Cosmè Tura: the two tondi of san Maurelio at the Pinacoteca di Ferrara
If we were to identify, in Cosmè Tura's entire production, a single detail that could serve as a summary of his expressionist painting ante litteram, nervous, sculptural, so crazy and disturbing, so far from the orderly and seraphic Renais...Read more...
In short, why are museums and libraries closing? Some elements of evaluation
The total shutdown of culture (exhibitions and museums, but also archives and libraries) imposed by the government with the dpcm of November 3 and the substantial resignation with which those working in the field, with few exceptions, have greete...Read more...
A November before which to die of melancholy. Antonio Fontanesi's masterpiece
Few times of the year are as melancholy as the last week of October, when daylight saving time ends and darkness suddenly falls, voracious, like a quick and heavy curtain, almost suddenly extinguishing the red lights of the sunsets (the most be...Read more...
Why it is profoundly wrong to close Rai Storia and merge it with Rai 5
At the moment the news is not yet official, but the rumors are chasing each other with more and more pungent insistence: Rai might close Rai Storia for reasons of so-called spending review, which is necessary to allow public television to overcom...Read more...
A painting to see and smell: Perfume by Luigi Russolo
Perfume is an enveloping, intoxicating, fragrant, full, hypnotic work. A disruptive cascade of adjectives could go on to overwhelm Luigi Russolo's masterpiece, a painting that can be seen and smelled, heard and admired, which aims to evoke in ...Read more...
A masterpiece of silk and damask: Tobias and the Angel by Jacopo Vignali
There is a precise reason, theological and political, for the frequent presence of works featuring Tobias and his angel in almost all Italian collections that include a substantial number of seventeenth-century objects. The fact is that the most ...Read more...
If it will be curfew, at least make an exception for cinemas and theaters
From an article published this morning in the Manifesto, we learn that among the measures under consideration by the government to contain the wave of Covid-19 contagion would include a curfew from 9 or 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., which would therefore e...Read more...
Uffizi spread across the territory? A great idea for imagining the museums of the future
Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt did well to emphasize last week, in responding to a question at a press conference, that in the future there will be no room for projects that can be labeled "Uffizi 2," but there will, if anything, be several places ...Read more...
Lorenzo Lotto's restlessness between Leopardi and Anna Banti: the Transfiguration of Recanati
Those who try to find, in Giacomo Leopardi's writings, a glimmer of interest in Lorenzo Lotto will be disappointed. Yet it will be said that the coincidences are many. Starting with the presence of the Venetian artist in the "native wild village,...Read more...
From the Arabian Nights to Venice: the princesses of Vittorio Zecchin, the Italian Klimt
Anyone looking at his works will immediately be led to think of a kind of Italian Gustav Klimt. A Venetian intoxicated by the fragrances of the Viennese secession. A young man from Murano, the son of a glassmaker, and therefore trained in the g...Read more...
"Before the mad wandering world, afterwards Christ's beloved lover": Titian's Magdalene
In a passage from his Lives, and specifically in the one dedicated to Titian, Giorgio Vasari lists some works admired in the wardrobe of Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere, at the time the great historiographer visited Urbino, in 1548: among these w...Read more...
Why did Ferragni at the Uffizi make you so much more outraged than D&G at the Palazzo Vecchio?
Meanwhile, the data: today, September 23, 2020, those who try to Google "Chiara Ferragni" and "Uffizi" will get more than a hundred thousand results. On the other hand, those who search for information on "Dolce and Gabbana" (or "Dolce & Gabban...Read more...
Seductive, strong and suave: the appearance of Christ to his mother by Guercino
It bears the date of October 17, 1786, Johann Wolfang Goethe's visit to Cento, appropriately and extensively noted in his Italienische Reise. The great man of letters, having arrived in this industrious strip of the Po Valley on a mild autumn eve...Read more...
Antonio Addamiano (Dep Art Gallery): "this is why galleries in Italy, on the web, struggle the most"
How is the recovery of the art gallery sector going? Has digital been a successful challenge or is there still something to fix? How are galleries preparing for the reopening of events and fairs? What are the differences between Italy and abroad? W...Read more...
Erompe from the bark a woodland nymph: Plinio Nomellini's "Red Nymph"
A nymph strides through the thicket of the forest, and with her hands gently wreathes her tawny head. The sunset light blazes and floods the dense, parched forest with vermilion red: in the center, the thick, haughty trunk of a holm oak. Below, a...Read more...
The Rose of Franco Maria Ricci. The unrepeatable existence of a contemporary humanist.
The last image of Franco Maria Ricci was that of a distinguished octogenarian who, having returned to dwell in the countryside of Fontanellato, had discarded the suits he had worn all his life and opted for a green loden jacket, worn over a pair ...Read more...
Florence, Palazzo Vecchio gifted to D&G: closed 13 days with free concession
Almost two weeks of closure to allow a private individual to organize his own party in a public space: this is what happens, amid general silence, in Florence, where Palazzo Vecchio keeps its doors closed for no less than thirteen consecutive day...Read more...
The man in the bow tie. How Daverio changed art on television.
The first impact with Philippe Daverio and his Passepartout was not, usually, of the happiest: indeed, for many his figure was even repelling. There is no denying that his presence embodied the classic clichés of the art historian fixed in the...Read more...
When Cattelan wanted to replace the monument to Mazzini with a statue of Craxi
In the last five minutes of lightning-fast and thunderous media celebrity to which the debate on monuments has risen (the karst flow of which has alternated between sudden emergencies, provoked by events of close relevance, and more more or less ...Read more...
Women's Music. A painting, a book, a concert, a museum in Venice.
There are three reasons that usually prompt visitors to cross the threshold of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice: Giovanni Bellini's Presentation in the Temple , the magnificence of the salons, and Carlo Scarpa 's spaces on the first floor. ...Read more...
Good morning MiBACT! Finally answers on direct assignments and the south: but they don't satisfy
A direct response from the MiBACT press office to grievances emanating from the grassroots is a decidedly rare occurrence: nevertheless, the problem with the two communiqués issued yesterday afternoon, through which the ministry sought to take...Read more...
Scarlett Biscotti: "with my art I seek the confrontation between individual memory and history"
Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, 1978) is among the most interesting contemporary European artists. With her work, Rossella Biscotti investigates archival objects and materials to bring out their history (even the most uncomfortable, or the forgotten...Read more...
Museums on singers and works 20 years overdue: are these Franceschini's priorities?
I think common to many people is the sense of satisfaction felt last week on receiving the news of the allocation of twelve million euros, by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, to complete the long-standing affair of Isozaki's Loggia, the great w...Read more...
Is it acceptable to close Piazza della Signoria in Florence for a "super VIP" dinner?
Florence 's municipal administration probably has a soft spot for "VIP" dinners in public spaces. And although it might have been assumed that, after the heated controversy that accompanied the Ferraristi banquets on the Ponte Vecchio in 2013 and Mor...Read more...
Why can't Italy have a museum or documentation center on fascism?
It is well known that instrumentalizations exploit very blurred boundaries: sometimes, those that simply run between two articulated prepositions. So it happens that, in Rome, three city councilors of the Pentastellata majority (Gemma Guerrini, Mas...Read more...
Wolves, hands, and carnivores. Does the Uffizi have a problem with contemporary art?
Can the Uffizi Galleries, the largest and most visited museum center in our country, and where the best of Italian (and other) art of all time is preserved, indulge in moments of excessive ... relaxation aboutcontemporary art? Doubts come quickly...Read more...
Bugo: I wanted to be a temporary artist. I tell you about my parenthesis
His real name is Cristian Bugatti, he was born in Rho in 1973 grew up in Cerano, and his stage name is Bugo: everyone knows him as an important singer-songwriter and musician (many consider him the father of Italianindie ), but not everyone knows t...Read more...
Recovery Fund, now is the time to make structural investments in culture
If it is true, as many are at pains to repeat, that every crisis is an opportunity, this time the cultural sector can be glad to have received a golden one: the Recovery Fund is not only a historic achievement, the first fund in history that the ...Read more...
Justin Thompson (Black History Month Florence): "Talking about Africa and colonialism does not mean erasing Italian history, but enriching it."
Since 2016 in Florence, the Black History Month Florence project has aimed to explore African and Afro-descendant cultures in the Italian context. The research of this project has resonated widely in these weeks of protest by the Black Lives Matter...Read more...
"Love is the message, the message is death," Arthur Jafa's masterpiece describes the realities, dreams, and culture of the black community
"When a beautiful white girl runs into the arms of a black man, it means something is wrong. It is unequivocal proof." So begins Love is the message, the message is death, Arthur Jafa's masterpiece that a number of museums around the world (includi...Read more...
The Quinto Martini Park-Museum in Seano: the poetry of simplicity
When one admires a sculpture by Quinto Martini, at times, at a first careless glance, one might be overwhelmed by the temptation to consider his art as a sort of coda of nineteenth-century verism, an art strongly anchored to the naturalistic datu...Read more...
Silly Uffizi videos on TikTok: where's the problem? The trivializations are others
"Territorial pissings" is not only the title of a famous song by Nirvana, but is also the expression with which Labranca identified pseudo-intellectuals who self-validate their positioning within a social area by marking its territory, that is, b...Read more...
Cuts on culture to spend on welfarism? A risk to be averted
As Italy prepares to emerge from the coronavirus emergency and discuss revitalization proposals, a bill is being debated in Trentino that will be voted on tomorrow and risks setting a dangerous precedent: it is the Fugatti-Spinelli ddl, which gu...Read more...
Canova and Thorvaldsen, the eternal challenge from which modern sculpture was born. The exhibition in Milan
Milan had to content itself with being irradiated by a lightning-fast reverberation of the dispute that pitted the two great rivals of neoclassical sculpture, Antonio Canova (Possagno, 1757 - Venice, 1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (Copenhagen, 1770...Read more...
We don't have to justify tearing down controversial monuments. There are other solutions
I feel deep embarrassment when I read certain hasty and superficial judgments about the wave of protests of the Black Lives Matter movement that has swept through Anglo-Saxon countries and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Western world. I find ...Read more...
How museum visits change with coronavirus. A tale from five institutions in three cities
There is no virus for Donatello's putti wiggling on the pulpit panels of Prato Cathedral: their festive dance has been going on for nearly six hundred years, heedless of any traversal, ready to mock wars and epidemics to the sound of trumpets and t...Read more...
Sgarbi and the Syracuse Caravaggio: not moving it to Trentino would be a detriment. I explain why
I believe that I am a person above parties and above suspicion when it comes to the movement of works of art : what speaks is the history of our magazine, it is the many battles we have always engaged in and supported to avoid unnecessary transf...Read more...
The "beauty" has indeed gone there, in quarantine: indeed, in many cities in Italy it is still inaccessible
"We need to focus on the brand ofItaly in the world, to promote the incomparable artistic and natural heritage we possess. Because in all these months, we have to say it strongly, the beauty ofItaly has never gone into quarantine": these are some...Read more...
Simoninus of Trent: the "abusive saint" constructed by late 15th century propaganda to stir up anti-Semitic hatred
One might feel a sort of unpleasant embarrassment knowing that it took almost four hundred years for the Church to erase a cult that, over the centuries, has fed anti-Semitic prejudice, with the aggravating circumstance of having exploited the b...Read more...
Franceschini doesn't answer: here's the interview you won't read
For more than a month, we have been trying to obtain an interview with the minister of cultural heritage, Dario Franceschini, on the topic of culture during and after the health emergency. We submitted the request on April 14 and received sev...Read more...
Paola D'Agostino (Bargello director): "Going to a museum will be like taking an extraordinary private tour."
How are operations progressing in preparation for the reopening at the Bargello Museums? We caught up with the director, Paola D'Agostino, who told us what has been done during the period of closure due to the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus p...Read more...
"Great street artists have their own style and personality." Interview with Blek Le Rat, father of stencil art
"Great street artists have their own style and personality." Interview with Blek Le RatStreet artist Blek Le Rat (Xavier Prou; Paris, 1951) is one of the pioneers of international street art and the father and initiator of stencil graffiti, the same...Read more...
Who will want to visit a museum full of prohibitions and obligations?
In an op-ed we hosted in the December issue of our print magazine, art historian Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, and former director of CIMAM-the International Committee of Museums of Mode...Read more...
To promote small museums, the way is not to bring us the "masterpieces" of big museums
Circulate masterpieces from "major museums" by lending them to "smaller museums" and launch "quality contemporary art" initiatives in smaller, decentralized venues. This is what Pierluigi Panza proposed last May 1 in the columns of the Florentine...Read more...
The circus is closed, but will the buffets return? Thoughts for a model of cultural progress...passing through Carrara
Among the books I try to keep on hand at all times is a cornerstone of the bibliography on exhibition events, Francis Haskell's The Birth of Exhibitions: In tracing the history of art exhibitions, the English art historian believed that the exhibitio...Read more...
Windows on Art introduces online subscription. The new formula for reading the magazine
Dear Reader, the challenges that the future of publishing poses to us are arduous, long and demanding: this is especially so in a small sector such as ours, that of art publishing, which relies on the passion of so many readers who make up...Read more...
Yes, it is a divisive holiday. Two thoughts and a painting for April 25
Two thoughts for a different April 25 than usual, for a Liberation Day that, for the first time in history and for a sort of mocking irony of fate, sees us all segregated at home by the imposition of a series of decrees that we are all abiding by...Read more...
Nadia Righi (Diocesan Museum of Milan), "This is how our guides also work online."
In these days of enforced closure, the Diocesan Museum of Milan (which was attended by35,000 visitorsin 2019 ) has created an unprecedented and original online guided tour model, replicating on the web the experience that the institute has been succ...Read more...
Cecilie Hollberg (Academy Gallery): "The post-virus museum will be digital, collaborative and close to the public."
How does the Accademia Gallery in Florence, one of the most visited museums in Italy and among the top 40 in the world, plan to respond to the challenge posed by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic? With Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Florenti...Read more...
When Angelo Morbelli painted the abandonment and despair of the elderly at the Pio Albergo Trivulzio
When one admires a painting whose protagonists are elderly people segregated in a hospice, what one is contemplating is "not a normal aspect of our culture, so to speak," wrote art historian Michael F. Zimmermann a few years ago, speaking of the ...Read more...
Why the reopening of libraries is good (although it should have been done more judiciously)
In order to deal in the most rational and shrewd way with the issue of reopening bookstores, it is possible, in the meantime, to remorselessly shred all the rhetoric made up of melancholy along the lines of "the bread of the soul book" and so on ...Read more...
Why the pandemic pushes us to think as a global community. Filippo Del Corno, city councilor for culture in Milan, Italy, speaks.
The health emergency due to the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic has called into question many aspects of our lives that we took for granted, and will force us to rethink them. It is not only about how we live our daily cultural experi...Read more...
"After the virus, the desire for art will be stronger than before." Gianluca De Felice, secretary of the Opera della Primaziale Pisana, speaks.
More than 3 million visitors, more than 14 million in revenue devoted to conservation and promotion: these are two numbers for the monuments in Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli, managed by the Opera della Primaziale Pisana. Four monuments (the Cathedra...Read more...
Coronavirus in the media. The overexposure of virologists and the absence of a humanistic approach
A couple of examples. The first is from last March 29, on the program Che tempo che fa: according to virologist Roberto Burioni, on the day when the health emergency ends and we can finally go outside, "we will all have to wear a mask every four ...Read more...
"Do we really want to go back to the situation that existed before the closure?" Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, speaks.
How is Italy's most visited museum, namely the Uffizi Gallery (along with the museums in its cluster), coping with the health emergency over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic? What will museums have to do when there is a restart? ...Read more...
Senator Zanda wants to secure Italian debt with public assets (including museums). All we can do is cry
The issue of public debt, it is known, has always stimulated the most fervid creativity, especially in times of crisis, when any solution to reduce the burden on Italians is thrown around with the most nonchalant nonchalance, a bit like when, a...Read more...
Carlo Bononi according to Andrea Emiliani
It is above all to the art historian Andrea Emiliani (Predappio, 1931 - Bologna, 2019) that we owe the rediscovery of a genius of seventeenth-century Ferrarese art, Carlo Bononi (Ferrara, c. 1580 - 1632), whom in 1962, Giacomo Bargellesi lamented...Read more...
Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio. Salvator Rosa, or the artist's freedom of thought.
Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio. "Either keep silent, or say something that is better than silence." The sculptural evidence of those six words engraved on the panel that Salvator Rosa carelessly holds up in his Self-Portrait at the National G...Read more...
Without culture you can't live. We have responded well to the emergency, but now we think about how to continue when it ends
The narrative of the ongoing health emergency has developed, with continuous and constant vehemence, mainly around the work of those who have been identified as the "front lines" of the war on the coronavirus, namely the doctors, nurses and, in g...Read more...
Art influencers and art critics: between new and old exhibitionisms, between desire to appear and desire to tell
Fifteen years have passed since Chicago Tribune art critic Lori Waxman began touring museums, galleries and various exhibition venues with her now-famous performance, 60 wrd/min art critic, whose mechanism is very simple: in the space chosen to hos...Read more...
"The National Gallery ofUmbria is the most civic-minded state museum there is." Interview with director Marco Pierini
A museum that has changed its face: this could be said of the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia, which since 2015, that is, since it became an autonomous museum following the Franceschini reform, under the direction of art historian Marco Pie...Read more...
Canova in Carrara is a flop: a meaningless exhibition of plaster casts, peep shows, mignon reproductions and video projections
For a long time we have been repeating on these pages that the mere visitor count should not be the yardstick by which to measure the success of an exhibition. Similarly, we have always refrained from evaluating the success of an exhibition on the ba...Read more...
Unholy loans: the National Museum of Capodimonte loses its jewels for four months. Caravaggio included
While in these hours there is an argument over the loan of a work by Raphael, the Portrait of Leo X, which will temporarily leave the Uffizi to reach Rome, where it will be exhibited at the maximostra on the Urbinate for the 500th anniversary of...Read more...
Is Banksy a great artist? No, he is just yet another byproduct of aesthetic populism
An exhibition on Banksy has been circulating for some time now that invites visitors to decide whether the anonymous Bristol street artist is a genius or a vandal: that, at least, is the question the title of the exhibition poses to its audience....Read more...
Are you indignant about the history of art being taught at Yale? Worry about the one that is not taught in Italy
It is pleasing to note that a good number of Italian newspapers have rediscovered their passion forteaching art history and spent the weekend just past delighting our intellects with refined analyses of the decisions ofYale University, which, kee...Read more...
We have come to compare visiting museums to soccer games
It is a little more disconcerting than usual this year to read the statement on museum visitor data that the Ministry of Culture annually releases at the end of January to present the previous year's results. And the disquiet, of course, does not...Read more...
Prayers of stone: the majesties, marble votive reliefs of the Apuan Alps and Lunigiana
"Prayers of stone." this is how, with this image of icastic immediacy, scholar Caterina Rapetti had renamed the majesties of Lunigiana in a study published in 1992, after a decade of reconnaissance in the area, aimed at surveying the Lunigiana portio...Read more...
Everyone wants Modigliani, but Italy snubs the centenary. Will France be the one to celebrate it?
Sixty thousand visitors in two months of opening: such is the proportion of the flow that has so far affected the exhibition Modigliani and the Montparnasse Adventure, which the city of Livorno has set up in the halls of the Museo della Città ...Read more...
"In the future, museums must reflect the complexity of our times." Interview with Mami Kataoka, president of CIMAM
At the end of November, CIMAM (the International Committee for Museums of Modern Art), the leading international body of modern and contemporary art museums around the world, affiliated with ICOM, appointed its new president: Japan's Mami Katao...Read more...
"A Touch of Magic. The "sorcerous" Dosso Dossi in his youthful masterpieces between Ariosto and mythology
Few artists can boast of calling themselves truly magical, and Dosso Dossi is among those who belong to this rare genius. Perhaps it is because Dosso is in danger of entrancing us that Berenson suggested, in his seminal North Italian Painters of ...Read more...
The drama of our graduates competing for the MiBACT competition. Their stories, their sacrifices, their hopes
Perhaps for some people the data on the employment rates of our graduates are not shocking enough: otherwise, it would not explain why this is a topic that interests the public very little and emerges very infrequently in political debate. So, if col...Read more...
"Here's how we saved works from the 2016 earthquake." Curators of the "Marche Renaissance" exhibition speak.
Fifty-one works from the sites of the 2016 central Italian earthquake will soon return to the cities and towns of the crater, from which they came: first, however, they will be displayed in a three-stage exhibition, entitled Renaissance in the Ma...Read more...
When European artists dreamed of Japan. Japanism in nineteenth-century art on display in Rovigo.
It was the French artist Philippe Burty (Paris, 1830 - 1890) who was the first to coin, in 1872, a term later destined to identify that mania for Japan which, for at least two decades to that part, had taken possession of many painters, sculpto...Read more...
The emotion of Guercino and his sacred drama, in his Cento
The erudite Gaetano Atti narrates, in his Sunto storico della città di Cento (Historical summary of the city of Cento), that on July 6, 1796, two Napoleonic commissioners, named Ciney and Berthollet (to be identified, in all likelihood, with t...Read more...
Futurism: in Pisa, an exhibition chronicling the movement by letting artists speak with posters
If today we admire fundamental masterpieces of the Futurists in museums halfway around the world, we owe that possibility to the substantial disinterest (if not toostracism tout court) that the cultural milieu of postwar Italy reserved for Bocc...Read more...
State museums always free for everyone? We can't afford it (and we're not the only ones): here's why
In January 2018, the Metropolitan Museum in New York surprised the world by sanctioning the end of its decades-long admission policy, which provided free admission for all upon a free bid, and introducing a $25 admission fee for all visitors ...Read more...
Raphael and friends in Urbino: an exhibition on artistic entanglements in early 16th century Marche
As is well known to all those who have approached the figure of Raphael Sanzio (Urbino, 1483 - Rome, 1520), tradition usually divides his brief, dazzling, dense and unrepeatable career into three distinct portions: an early youthful phase, whic...Read more...
Comedian (banana and tape on wall): a work in which everything is Maurizio Cattelan
It may seem strange to say, but Maurizio Cattelan 's banana has an illustrious precedent when it comes to food elevated to the status of a work of art. And certainly we are not talking about seventeenth-century still lifes filled with fruits of eve...Read more...
Giulio Romano at the Ducal Palace, an exhibition of drawings in the places for which they were imagined
More than 270,000 visitors were counted when the doors of the major exhibition on Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi de' Iannuzzi; Rome, c. 1499 - Mantua, 1546), which had begun just two months earlier, on September 1, 1989, closed at Palazzo Te in Mant...Read more...
What was sex like in the sixteenth century? Made of orgies, dildos and acrobatic copulation: ask Giulio Romano and colleagues
"Petrarchism is a chronic disease of Italian literature," wrote Arturo Graf at the beginning of one of his memorable essays in 1888: and the sixteenth century is "the century in which Petrarchism floats, luxuriates, triumphs and overflows." It is d...Read more...
Why has the high water drama in Venice unleashed legions of haters on social media?
The drama of the high water that hit Venice on the night of November 12-13, with the second highest tide ever (or at least since scientific records exist), is also likely to be remembered for the load of social hatred that, for some reason, it ma...Read more...
But do we really give a damn about Venice?
In the long list of editorials that all the newspapers have dedicated in these hours to the drama of Venice, no mention has been made of a fact that dates back to the beginning of this year: on January 31, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, with a ...Read more...
Ginevra Pucci and Stefania Poddighe: "The market supports culture, but without culture there would be no market."
Flashback, the ancient and contemporary art fair held every year in Turin, for this 2019 comes to its seventh edition: as per its characteristic, this year there is a central theme (the Wanderers), and as every year the quality is very high. Wait...Read more...
Biennale, the Italian Pavilion is weak and superficial, and the real artist is the curator
The multifarious conglomeration of articles, short articles, editorials, reviews, elzeviri, and rinses of communiqués that have been accompanying the Italian Pavilion 's exhibition(Neither Other Nor This. The Challenge to the Labyrinth) at the...Read more...
Orazio Gentileschi in the Marche: of the nobility and complexity of the province. Fabriano exhibition.
Among the episodes of Caravaggio 's biography that are less frequented by scholars is perhaps the stay that the great Lombard painter made in the Marche region between October 1603 and April 1604: the product of those few months' stay in the regi...Read more...
Can art be made with the telephone? We discuss this with Vittoria Martini, curator of Artissima Telephone
The 26th edition of Artissima, the major contemporary art exhibition-market to be held in Turin from November 1 to 3, 2019, will also feature, among its various projects, Artissima Telephone, an exhibition that will take place in the rooms of OGR...Read more...
Ilaria Bonacossa: "We reflect on art, sex, and censorship because the freedoms we took for granted are in question"
The 2019 edition of Artissima, the great contemporary art exhibition-market (more information here), will be dedicated to the dialectic between desire and censorship: the aim of the kermesse is to initiate reflections that concern various themes,...Read more...
To grow, we need to invest in culture: our heritage exists because someone spent on it. Francesca Velani, LuBeC director, speaks.
Heritage and innovation: these two words could be used to sum up the LuBeC - Lucca Beni Culturali exhibition, which for the past fifteen years has brought to Lucca the most advanced products and practices dealing with topics such as technology, digit...Read more...
At Palazzo Antinori, the exhibition on the image of Florence according to Giovanni and Telemaco Signorini, two generations of great artists
The discovery in 2008 of an important correspondence between Telemaco Signorini (Florence, 1835 - 1901), one of the leading painters of the second half of the 19th century and a leading name in the Macchiaioli movement, and his father Giovan...Read more...
Antiques Biennial, secretary Fabrizio Moretti speaks: ancient art between market, bureaucracy and culture
The XXXI edition of the Florence Biennale Internazionale dell'Antiquariato, one of the world's leading antique art exhibition-markets, confirms the success of its predecessors: once again this year we saw, among the exhibitors, the main players o...Read more...
Leonardo and Raphael loans, France beats Italy 21-7. Franceschini, what are you doing!
The exchange of works between Italy and France for the exhibitions celebrating the 500th anniversary of the disappearances of Leonardo and Raphael (in 2019 the Da Vinci, in 2020 the Urbino) provides that twenty-one works will leave Italy for France, ...Read more...
The Wonder of the Ancient in Luca Signorelli. Rome's classical charm on display at the Capitoline Museums.
In the late 19th century, Maud Cruttwell, author of one of the first extensive monographs on Luca Signorelli (Cortona, c. 1450 - 1523), wrote that the great artist from Cortona would be destined to find nothing but bitterness in Rome. Indeed, bey...Read more...
Peter Aufreiter: "Italy lacks flexibility, and museum directors are forced to be administrators"
The term of the director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino and the Polo Museale delle Marche, Peter Aufreiter (Linz, 1974), is coming to an end. An Austrian art historian, Aufreiter is one of the foreign directors of autonomous mus...Read more...
No to the sanctification of Gabriele d'Annunzio, but no also to the simplifications of Tomaso Montanari
It may also make sense to take the side of those who do not welcome the idea of installing a monument to Gabriele d'Annunzio in Trieste: it is not the right historical moment, and at a time of resurgent nationalism the act of the local municipal ...Read more...
Bonisoli reform: summer bungling without parliamentary discussion. Autonomies and small museums at risk
If there is one merit to be given to the Minister of Cultural Heritage Alberto Bonisoli, it is that of having put everyone in agreement on his cultural heritage reform: all parties, from the PD to the League, from Potere al Popolo to Fratelli d'I...Read more...
Three years since the 2016 earthquake. Delpriori: "Very slow reconstruction, works still in storage. The last government? Utter nothingness."
On Aug. 24, 2016, at 3:36 a.m., an earthquake tremor of magnitude moment 6.0 struck central Italy, and in particular the municipalities of Accumoli, Arquata del Tronto and Amatrice, between which was the epicenter of the quake. The area has since b...Read more...
Will the Bonisoli reform's mergers permanently sink small museums?
With a mid-August blitz, which follows in the well-established tradition of approving crucial decrees at times of the year when one would expect everyone to be distracted by vacations and festivities (and, this time, with the aggravating factor o...Read more...
Pietro Aretino, one of the most important and considered figures of the 1500s. Interview with Paolo Procaccioli
More on the monographic exhibition dedicated to Pietro Aretino (Arezzo, 1492 - Venice, 1556), entitled Pietro Aretino and the Art of the Renaissance, which will be held in the Magliabechiana Hall of the Uffizi Gallery from November 27, 2019 to Ma...Read more...
The sweetness of the sea, the beaches, the Mediterranean. The plural painting of Moses Levy
Perhaps it is not a leap to claim that if today, in our imagination, a certain image of Versilia has been formed (an image made up of elegant promenades on the seafront, of vast beaches dotted with umbrellas of all colors, of evenings among fashi...Read more...
Could the government crisis cause chaos in cultural heritage?
For sure, the government crisis opened over the weekend by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini will not collapse the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, but in the aftermath of the publication in the Official Gazette of the reform of the d...Read more...
Pietro Aretino and the relationship with the arts in the Renaissance. Interview with Anna Bisceglia and Matteo Ceriana
In November, the Uffizi will open a major exhibition dedicated to the great man of letters Pietro Aretino (Arezzo, 1492 - Venice, 1556), entitled Pietro Aretino and the Art of the Renaissance (Aula Magliabechiana of the Uffizi, from November 27, ...Read more...
Pont des Trous, why it is wrong to demolish it (even though it was rebuilt after the war)
Advocates of the demolition of the Pont des Trous, the medieval bridge in Tournai, Belgium, which will be "deconstructed" (this is the politically correct term used to cover reality with a light and transparent veil) to allow the passage of boats...Read more...
UNESCO World Heritage Site, criticism rains down this year. Is it a system that needs to be changed?
Last July 9, a long article, signed by political science researcher Simon Maghakyan, came out in Hyperallergic, calling the annual meeting ofUNESCO 's World Heritage Committee (the committee that decides on sites that are part of, or will become ...Read more...
2019 is the annus horribilis of volunteerism replacing work. Now there is also the officialdom
Until not so long ago, few would have admitted that fake volunteering in cultural heritage is thought to be a great way to replace stable, paid work when needed. And almost no one, of course, would have put it in writing. It was mostly a hallway ...Read more...
Krzysztof Wodiczko: "Refugees live in a kind of limbo, like familiar and foreign creatures at the same time."
In early June, Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (Warsaw, 1943) presented, for the first time in Italy, in Milan, his project Loro (Them), at the same time an installation and a performance: Wodiczko "humanized" some drones by giving them a face a...Read more...
Bonisoli reform, what goes and what doesn't. With a couple of possible ideas and insights
The reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage that, after a year of work, is completing its course these days (at the moment it is still in draft form, so the measures discussed below may be subject to change), contains few new features, but t...Read more...
"Dear friends and enemies, go fuck yourselves." Gastone Novelli between detachment, art and contestation
"There you go. Yes, dear friends, and enemies, and strangers, go fuck yourselves." Thus began a text that Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 - Milan, 1968) wrote between 1964 and 1965 to express all his disappointment, which in this invective was ting...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's "Scapiliata": fortunes, studies and new hypotheses on display in Parma
Water is, for a painter, one of the most difficult elements to reproduce with the brush. Impalpable, irrepressible, unstable, colorless, transparent. It undulates, it flows, it moves, it ripples, it adapts, it glows, it blurs. Matter and subject ...Read more...
Historic pine trees are being cut down in Carrara to resurface a sidewalk on the waterfront
They are already present in postcards of Carrara from the 1950s, they are a familiar presence for anyone who has spent their summers or vacations in the city, they are an important ecological garrison for the production of oxygen and the absorption...Read more...
The National Gallery of Liguria, a constantly enriching museum. Director Gianluca Zanelli speaks
The National Gallery of Liguria in Genoa, located in the historic Palazzo Spinola, is one of the most active museums in northern Italy. Constant exhibition activity, with small focused focuses on the collections, many initiatives for the public, ...Read more...
Crumbs to culture. The European Union's sensitivity to heritage policies and its (few) resources.
When one thinks ofEuropean Union policies and investments, one usually recalls issues such as industrial and agricultural development, viability, integration, and the environment: one hardly associates European policies with cultural heritage. Yet,...Read more...
New light on Mattia and Gregorio Preti, the excellent exhibition at Palazzo Barberini in Rome
"He told me his brother Gregorio that in order to pull him along and keep him at painting it set himself to work for shopkeepers, who were then rich and made work, whereupon he worked for the coloraro Nasini alla Sapienza; which by the way the th...Read more...
It would be time to end the useless nationalist whining about who celebrates Leonardo better between Italy and France
It is to be hoped that, as soon as the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death are over, all the tiresome, cloying, tedious and pointless controversies that have been accompanying the event for months and that, basically,...Read more...
How should we interpret the faux-beach victory of Lithuania's pavilion at the Venice Biennale?
It was not difficult to predict that Lithuania's pavilion would win the almost unanimous appreciation of the public at the Venice Biennale, as well as many insiders, although, perhaps, it was not so obvious to imagine that the performance curated b...Read more...
Angelo Morbelli, His Milan, Pointillism. The beautiful centenary exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art.
One of the most interesting and fruitful achievements of the exhibition Morbelli. 1853 - 1919, the valuable anthological exhibition that the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan is dedicating to Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria, 1853 - Milan, 1919) on t...Read more...
Nineteenth century in Forli: little new, but an exhibition that is like a great art history textbook
In the vast array of exhibitions that many institutions have reserved for the Italian Ottocento in the last period, it seemed impossible not to pay special attention to the Ottocento project, the vast review, curated by Francesco Leone and Fernando...Read more...
What happens if a major foundation decides to give up all its volunteers at once?
The news has escaped Italy's notice, but it has been causing discussion in the United Kingdom for at least three months: theArt Fund, a major cultural heritage organization (its main mission is to raise funds to donate to public museums for the ...Read more...
Antonello da Messina in Milan: a useless, embarrassing and hagiographic exhibition
One of the first contributions we come across while scrolling through the catalog of the exhibition Antonello da Messina, on view at the Palazzo Reale in Milan until next June 2, is a paper by Roberto Alajmo, who, as is well known, is a writer an...Read more...
When will our museums always open at night?
Last summer, as soon as the cycle of extraordinary evening openings at the Accademia Gallery in Florence was over, the director of the Florentine institute, Cecilie Hollberg, declared that the initiative had been a great success, and that the suc...Read more...
When artists painted like children. Infantilist primitivism in early twentieth-century Italian art.
When artists painted like children. Infantilist primitivism in early 20th century Italian art.In an enterprising exhibition that was mounted at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin in 1990 and was entitled Italian Expressionism, curators Renato Barilli and...Read more...
For a correct relocation of Margherita Sarfatti. Massimo Mattioli's pamphlet
The heavy damnatio memoriae to which Margherita Sarfatti (Venice, 1880 - Cavallasca, 1961) was forced because of her known ties with the Fascist regime did not allow a serene, full and correct evaluation of her dimension as an art critic, drastic...Read more...
45 euros to visit the Vasari Corridor? That's fair, but on one condition
Perhaps one mistake too many has been made in the discussion around the price that will have to be paid to access the Vasari Corridor when it is reopened(45 euros in high season, 20 euros in low season): the debate has focused almost exclusively ...Read more...
The exhibitions and activities of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, a winning model: talks director Maria Luisa Pacelli
Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara is one of the most active exhibition venues in the country. Managed by the Ferrara Arte Foundation, created in the early 1990s and an emanation of the city administration, the Palazzo attracts about 150,000 visitors ...Read more...
Grotesque heads and motions of the soul, Leonardo da Vinci drawn by Wenceslaus Hollar at the Pedretti Foundation
He was twenty-nine years old Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar (Václav Hollar; Prague, 1607 - London, 1677) when, in 1636 in Cologne, he had the opportunity to meet one of England's richest and most influential men, diplomat Thomas Howard, X...Read more...
Museums, interview with Minister Bonisoli. We will solve the problem of scripted volunteering. And we will still increase free admission
How are Italy's museums doing? What is the future of the recently introduced free admission plan? What are the main problems on which the next reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage will intervene? On the problem of volunteerism used as a su...Read more...
Paestum, a participatory and inclusive place to give a strong signal to the south. Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel speaks.
The Paestum Archaeological Park, under the direction of Gabriel Zuchtriegel, an archaeologist born in 1981, has undergone major transformations and has become a very active site. There have been many innovations, from the opening of the deposits ...Read more...
Verrocchio master of Leonardo, the first monographic exhibition on the great artist among masterpieces and new attributions
Despite the fact that the figure of Verrocchio (Andrea di Michele di Francesco Cioni; Florence, c. 1435 - Venice, 1488) is universally considered to be among the most significant in the history of art and his achievements are recognized as the ba...Read more...
Museums, the reality behind the ads: gap widens between large and small, payers grow little, tickets never so expensive
2018 was the year that set visitor and revenue records for our state museums (in fact, never had such high numbers been recorded : 55 million people flocking to cultural venues and 229 million euros in revenue), but if you want to analyze the data ...Read more...
Is Genoa's Ecce Homo really a work by Caravaggio? The answer at the Palazzo della Meridiana exhibition
In the past year alone there have been at least a couple of interesting opportunities that, though unrelated, have offered the public and scholars much material to open up an in-depth discussion on the development of Caravaggism in Genoa. In the ...Read more...
A survey of the theme of landscape in contemporary Italian art. The "Panorama" exhibition in Bologna
Landscape, Henri-Frédéric Amiel was convinced, reveals a state of our soul. The French philosopher entrusted this thought to his Journal intime drafted between 1883 and 1884: the experience of Friedrich with his panoramas at the window had...Read more...
Minister Bonisoli pledges 3,600 hires to cultural heritage. But can Quota 100 collapse the ministry?
Minister Alberto Bonisoli said yesterday at his regular meeting with trade unions that there will be 3,600 new hires at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in the time frame leading up to 2021. Of these 3,600 new hires, 1,000 are those provided for...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's loans to the Louvre: dialogue between Italy and France must continue, on a scientific basis
Before entering into the merits of the topic of the loans of Leonardo da Vinci's "Italian" works to the Louvre, it must necessarily be premised that, if the masterpieces of the great Tuscan artist were to finally leave for the temporary move to P...Read more...
Banksy and the shredded work, when contemporary art becomes a caricature of itself
The never-too-much lamented Tommaso Labranca, whose passing has been forgotten at the speed of light, had little appreciation for the figure of Banksy. Labranca had devoted a chapter of his last book, Vraghinaroda, to the British street artist, r...Read more...
Paul Klee, the interpreter of the non-visible. The exhibition at MuDEC in Milan
It was not long after the publication of his visionary essay The Spiritual in Art, that Vasily Kandinsky (Moscow, 1866 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944) began to develop the idea of starting to write an almanac that would collect reproductions of the most...Read more...
The mature Tintoretto between technical innovations and sublime portraits: the Venice exhibition (going to the U.S.)
No doubt hangs that the extraordinary Miracle of the Slave, the monumental canvas that Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, Venice, 1519 - 1594) painted in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, represents a kind of caesura between the youthful phase of...Read more...
Museums and financial autonomy, is the 2.3 million euro cut decided by the government a wake-up call?
There was very little discussion about it, but among the measures contained in the 2019 Budget Law, there was also a cut of 2.35 million euros to autonomous museums, established in paragraph 804 of Article 1: "the institutes and museums endowed w...Read more...
How Romanticism was born and developed in Italy. The major exhibition in Milan
The first contribution on the role of the open window on the landscape in the Romantic era dates back to 1955: it was titled The open window and the storm-tossed boat: an essay in the iconography of Romanticism, and its author, Lorenz Eitner, po...Read more...
Are 18-year-olds not going to the museum? Cost has nothing to do with it: they simply don't find it interesting
There is a myth that has long hovered around our museums and that seems to be rather difficult to eradicate: that of young people not visiting art venues because they would consider it an expensive activity. A conviction that has perhaps even cau...Read more...
Anton Maria Maragliano's spectacular exhibition in Genoa, including sacred theaters and marvelous processional chests
The name ofAnton Maria Maragliano (Genoa, 1664 - 1739) will say little to many living outside Liguria. The fame of this sculptor is mostly confined to Genoa and its environs, and past Ventimiglia and Luni (although, more accurately, it would be n...Read more...
What has the government done for culture in six months? Almost nothing. And it is not even considering its program
In the recent history of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, it is difficult to recall moments that surpass the current one in terms of the real distance between announced measures and concrete results. From the moment he took office, Minister Alb...Read more...
New perspectives for the study of the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. Interview with Michele Dantini
New perspectives for the study of the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. Interview with Michele DantiniArt and Politics in Italy between Fascism and the Republic (Donzelli, 2018) is the latest book by Michele Dantini, contempo...Read more...
Protection as an axis for the explosive growth of the Polo Museale della Lombardia. Director Stefano L'Occaso speaks
The Polo Museale della Lombardia, an entity that brings together several museums in the region including some celebrated sites such as the Cenacolo vinciano, the Rocca Scaligera and the Grotte di Catullo in Sirmione, the Parco Nazionale delle Inc...Read more...
Migrants in museums. Proposals for seriously addressing an extremely important topic
TheEuropean Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, an important document adopted by the European Commission in July 2011, defines integration as a process that aims to get migrants to participate in the society of their host count...Read more...
1929 Surrealism on display in Pisa: good idea, less so the implementation
The year 1929 has gone down in art history as a decisive year for the fate of Surrealism as a whole. That year, the movement founded in 1924 by André Breton (Tinchebray, 1896 - Paris, 1966) confronted crucial events that would mark its history...Read more...
"Here are Cavalier Tempesta's frescoes, and soon a major Dürer exhibition in Genoa." Art historian Margherita Priarone speaks.
Until January 6, 2019, the Salotto del Cavalier Tempesta, a precious room entirely frescoed by Pieter Mulier known as Cavalier Tempesta (Haarlem, 1637 - Milan, 1701), can be visited in Genoa's Palazzo Nicolosio Lomellino. These frescoes have rece...Read more...
Witches, ghosts, demons and esoteric cults: art and magic on display in Rovigo
In his Attic Nights, the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the first century of the common era, reported that all young men eager to approach the teachings of Pythagoras were required to observe at least two years of silence: the disciples...Read more...
On the myth of Leonardo da Vinci's Italian genius from the nineteenth century onward.
The tedious and futile nationalist polemics on theItalianity of Leonardo da Vinci, which from time to time are rekindled as a result of the unhinged interventions of some politician in search of easy stereotypes or some boutade that has more to do wi...Read more...
Andrea Chiesi's contemporary ruins, between Caspar David Friedrich and CCCP
The studio of Andrea Chiesi (Modena, 1966) is in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Modena, just after leaving the city, on the edge of a countryside that loses itself between the Secchia on one side and the provincial road that leads to Carpi on th...Read more...
Could Salvini introduce a ticket fee to visit Italian churches?
It may sound like a paradox to some, but it is well known that the Ministry of the Interior manages a vast cultural heritage, one of the most valuable in the world: it is the patrimony of the Fondo Edifici di Culto (FEC), an entity that holds own...Read more...
Is there a new painting by Lorenzo Lotto in Recanati? The "provocation" of Macerata's major exhibition.
A "reasonable bet" and a "critical provocation that can only provoke discussion": with such definitions, Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo intended to present a new and suggestive attributional hypothesis for the Holy Family preserved at the Diocesan Muse...Read more...
Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia, Paola Marini's farewell: the balance is positive
In a letter sent this morning to her contacts, Paola Marini, director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, bid farewell to the museum, its board of directors, the scientific committee, colleagues, collaborators and, of course, the public: Ma...Read more...
The Parisian Mantegna. The works of the Musée Jacquemart-André
Contrary to what one might believe, the practice of block exchanges of artworks between international museums is not a recent custom. If anything, it is of recent times the custom to give birth to reciprocal loans that feed totally useless exhibi...Read more...
On exhibitions, part 1. But is it true that Italy does not have world-class exhibitions?
In recent weeks, the entire Italian exhibition scene has found itself, malgré lui, having to suffer the blows of the crossfire of Venerdì di Repubblica and Il Foglio, which came out, a week apart (on September 14 and 21) with two articles s...Read more...
Bonisoli like Franceschini: "Let's bring works from repositories to schools." The problems? "Who cares!"
During a speech in the Chamber of Deputies last October 4 that escaped most, the minister of cultural heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, proposed a project that he said should "lead to change": on the surface, all consistent with the title of the confer...Read more...
The fourteenth century in and around Spoleto, the art of the anonymous masters
It is difficult to fully understand Umbrian painting if one has never been to Umbria: there is no art historian who has not remarked how the art of the painters who were active in this portion of Italy is firmly based on close connections with it...Read more...
The summer of attacks on culture and information: what possible consequences?
The very recent affair at the Monfalcone Municipal Library, where the local leghist junta, according to a report in Repubblica, first forced the cutting of subscriptions to Il Manifesto and L'Avvenire and then the failure to make them available t...Read more...
"Art must be disturbing and leave us perplexed, otherwise it makes no sense." Interview with Roberto Chiabrera
Roberto Chiabrera (Genoa, 1970) is, in our opinion, one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary Italian scene, and perhaps too underestimated: his is an art out of the box (at least out of the Italian box, because there is nothing Ita...Read more...
Unacceptable treatment of the director of the Museo della Gente Trentina. A museum is not just the number of visitors
What happened on Thursday, September 13, during the W l'Italia program on Rete 4, to the director of the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina in San Michele all'Adige, Giovanni Kezich, is unacceptable. Unacceptable for two main reasons...Read more...
Minister Bonisoli's mouse. Why the news on museum access is just smoke and mirrors
It is curious to note how the minister of cultural heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, took more than a month (starting the count from the date of theannouncement of the abolition of free Sundays in museums) to give birth to a package of measures that, i...Read more...
Bonisoli, the minister who doesn't answer. Here's the interview you won't read
Dear friends of Windows on Art, we believe that a newspaper performs a fundamental service for its readers when, in addition to guaranteeing up-to-date and accurate daily information, it is also able to conduct timely in-depth analysis: that is why ...Read more...
Renzi imitates Alberto Angela, but why do politicians with cultural ambitions abound lately?
Surely many of those reading this article will have had a chance to see the trailer for Florence, the documentary that intends to take viewers on a discovery of Florence, with the guidance of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. And not a few will...Read more...
Milan, the beauty of being cool-tural: the challenge of a city-state of the future. Filippo Del Corno, Councillor for Culture, speaks.
Milan is recognized as the economic capital of Italy, and for the past few years it has also intended to assume the role of cultural capital. Not only that: in the last decade, Milan's international prestige has grown considerably, and as part of t...Read more...
From Klimt to Friedrich, Repin to Schiele, the other 19th century in a slim book by Eugenio Riccomini
It is well known that several art historians manifest some difficulty when called upon to change their register in order to meet with favor and to arouse the interest of the general public. This is not the case for Eugenio Riccomini (Nuoro, 1936)...Read more...
St. Joseph of the Carpenters collapse: why it makes no sense to say "the Vatican will take care of it" (and blame... migrants!)
It is disheartening to note that populist bitterness has not spared misplaced comments even on the collapse of the precious ceiling of the church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami in Rome. As if such a serious fact were an event that does not concern...Read more...
The work of art is always a political act, and it is impossible to separate art from politics
Populist rhetoric against the press, in Italy as well as abroad, risks producing nefarious effects on art journalism as well: the problem, pointed out by the editor of The Art Newspaper, Helen Stoilas, in an article last August 16, entails unprec...Read more...
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Maremma masterpieces, between art, politics and iconographic innovations
The recent exhibition Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Maremma. Masterpieces from the Territories of Grosseto and Siena, at the Complesso Museale di San Pietro all'Orto in Massa Marittima until September 16, 2018, made it possible to focus attention on the...Read more...
For Beato Angelico in Rome: the important first monograph on the subject, by Gerardo de Simone
It has a classical and monumental scope in the monograph Il Beato Angelico a Roma 1445-1455. Rebirth of the Arts and Christian Humanism in the Urbe of Nicholas V and Leon Battista Alberti, the latest work by Gerardo de Simone (Castellammare di St...Read more...
Gianfranco Ferroni: hopes, disillusions, expectations on display in Seravezza
Everything is about to be accomplished. This is the title of one of the paintings with which Gianfranco Ferroni (Livorno, 1927 - Bergamo, 2001) participated in the 1968 Venice Biennale. An assortment of objects of different natures, detonators, the...Read more...
How to talk about art lightly but with rigor and depth: Vivian Maier according to Roberto Carlone. The interview
Is it possible to tell about art in a light-hearted way, but without losing sight of rigor and depth, without neglecting serious research work? Theanswer is affirmative, and an excellent example of this is the play Gli occhi di Vivian Maier (I'm ...Read more...
What we learned from the case of the Leghist deputy mayor who wanted to censor Marina Abramović's poster
The Trieste I have in mind is the one that welcomes a barely 22-year-old James Joyce, who among the streets of the Julian city, which he called his "second homeland," would know poverty and success, joys and disappointments, find inspiration for ...Read more...
In 18th-century Sarzana guided by a historian of the period. Bonaventura de' Rossi's copious Collettanea.
In a possible list of the major and most important reference points for studying the history of the arts in Sarzana, a prominent place could certainly be occupied by a work by historian Bonaventura de' Rossi (Sarzana, 1666 - Genoa, 1741), the copious...Read more...
Free Sundays at museums, good to abolish them. But beyond announcements, we need a forward-looking project
The long-awaited announcement, already foreseeable for a few weeks, has finally arrived: free Sundays in state museums will be abolished. This was said yesterday by the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, however, specifying that it ...Read more...
Genoa, on the resounding resignation of very young culture alderman Elisa Serafini
Elisa Serafini 's resignation from her role as culture alderman of the Genoa City Council is sensational. Clamorous, of course, but not so unpredictable: Elisa Serafini was one of the most moderate members of a council led by Mayor Marco Bucci, v...Read more...
Andrea Bianconi's Fantastic Planet, dreamy atmospheres and a journey between Hell, Purgatory and Paradise
For Andrea Bianconi (Arzignano, 1974) everything has a direction. When we walk, think, discuss, eat, sleep, make love, perform the simplest of daily actions or plan the most complex decision of our lives, we move following a direction. We walk gu...Read more...
Are the hours of free Sundays numbered? Perhaps, waiting for the real revolution that museums need
Perhaps, free Sundays have their hours counted and may soon become a thing of the past. Earlier this year, from these pages, the writer had launched the proposal to abolish them and think about alternative forms of incentive, and after recent state...Read more...
On the triumph of aesthetic populism
In his seminal Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism begun in 1984, Fredric Jameson had summarized, with great clarity, the cultural trend that had been foreshadowed by MacDonald some twenty years earlier and that perhaps more t...Read more...
The 1960s, birth of the nation: but which one? An alternative reading of the major exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi
Interestingly, in the entire catalog of the exhibition Birth of a Nation. Between Guttuso, Fontana and Schifano, currently underway in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, the word "nation," minus the repetitions in the title, registers only five occurre...Read more...
Genoa, the drama of the Villa Croce Museum: a museum without certainty about the future
Last January, in the pages of our magazine, we told you about one of the highlights of the crisis at the Villa Croce Museum in Genoa: in controversy with the city administration, which had granted the paltry sum of seventy thousand euros for the ...Read more...
Indecent homophobic racket against Milovan Farronato cannot be tolerated
After the news of the appointment of Milovan Farronato as curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, perhaps few expected that media attention would focus not on the critic's past experience, not on his ideas, not on what contours t...Read more...
Count government with grill-leftist traction, unprecedented game opens for culture
"Alberto Bonisoli is someone who has pursued a goal in his years of career: he has aimed to enhance the heritage of made in Italy that we have, to enhance the excellence that we have, and which in some cases is also a tourist attraction. In gener...Read more...
Want to learn about the main trends in contemporary Italian painting? Drop by Todi. There's De Prospectiva Pingendi
Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Autoritratto, the seminal essay with which Carla Lonzi redefined the boundaries of the art critic's profession, which she herself, after the publication of that writing, decided to abandon. The meaning ...Read more...
Dürer and the Renaissance in Milan, an exhibition that disappoints and does not convince
It really seems that Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, 1471 - 1528) has timidly begun to share, malgré lui, the fate that has long since befallen his other illustrious colleagues from different eras (Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol and assort...Read more...
Is it right for museums to lend their iconic masterpieces for temporary exhibitions?
All those who visited Cremona's Museo Civico "Ala Ponzone" this winter could not help but have an incomplete experience, probably unsatisfactory for many, since Cremona's best-known museum, from late October to early February, found itself withou...Read more...
Northern League and 5 Stars are light years apart on cultural heritage. Is there cause for concern?
In view of the imminent reaching of an agreement between the 5 Star Movement and the Northern League to form the next government, it seems quite legitimate to wonder what will happen to cultural heritage under an executive led by Leghists and Gri...Read more...
Gaetano Previati, religious painting that becomes human feeling: the Via al Calvario and the Via Crucis
When Gabriele D'Annunzio came into contact with the art dealer Alberto Grubicy in 1919, the poet was first involved in a publishing venture that was supposed to produce a book on Gaetano Previati (Ferrara, 1852 - Lavagna, 1920), and then he receive...Read more...
States of mind, in Ferrara an intense journey through emotions from Previati to Boccioni
In 1891, when Stéphane Mallarmé found himself in discussion with Jules Huret about the modes and purposes of Symbolist poetry, the great poet told his journalist friend that using a symbol means nothing more than choisir un objet, et en déga...Read more...
Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, in Milan a new paradigm but a repetitive, bulimic and dangerous exhibition
To many it will have seemed excessive what art historian Ester Coen wrote a few days ago in Dagospia about Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italy 1918 - 1943, perhaps the most discussed exhibition of this year. Coen's thesis, in essence, focu...Read more...
Is it really a good May Day for cultural workers? Unfortunately, it would seem not
While you are reading these lines, perhaps during a break in your May Day barbecue, while you are at the beach enjoying a foretaste of summer, or on your couch because you have decided to spend the holiday at home, somewhere in Italy a cultural w...Read more...
Kids acting as guides in museums for school-to-work alternation: very wrong. Do we find an alternative?
A couple of days ago a press release arrived in the newsroom informing us of an initiative being launched in Florence as part of theschool-to-work alternance projects, the institution introduced in 2003 by the Moratti reform in an optional form, ...Read more...
Van Dyck and his friends in Genoa: a genius and his Flemish colleagues in seventeenth-century Liguria
Despite the fact that the public has witnessed in recent years an increase in the number of exhibitions in which the topic of artistic connections between Genoa and Flanders in the seventeenth century was touched upon, the topic of the Flemish in...Read more...
Maurizio Cattelan: I always have something to learn
Next Monday, April 23, 2018, Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, 1960), will be in Carrara for the inauguration of the academic year of the Academy of Fine Arts: during the ceremony, he will receive the title of honorary professor and unveil Eternity, the ...Read more...
Montepulciano's tourism boom and the 500th anniversary of the temple of San Biagio. An interview with Riccardo Pizzinelli
TheValdichiana, and in particular the Montepulciano area, has experienced a real boom in tourist presences inrecent years. According to the Florence-based Center for Tourism Studies, which processed data provided by the Region of Tuscany and the ...Read more...
Vandals out of desperation. Painting to save us from degradation?
The street artist who decided to cover the niche of a 17th-century fountain in Carrara's historic center on Saturday night with strong, acidic and totally out-of-context colors, lime green and shocking pink, cannot help but recall what happened in Pa...Read more...
A modern dialogue between Italy and Spain on display in the halls of the Uffizi
In one of his seminal essays published in 1985, the great British scholar Michael Baxandall asserted that the problem of so-called "influence" is something of a curse for the art historian. It is a curse, argued Baxandall (the following translati...Read more...
Irony, eroticism, life: the rare and precious ceramics of visual poets on display at CAMeC
Of the thousands of works produced by the avant-gardists of Visual Poetry from the 1960s to the present, very few use a ceramic medium: a few dozen pieces that do not exceed three hundred. Most of these poems on ceramics have been brought togethe...Read more...
Endangered and awaiting recognition for eighteen years: the odyssey of restorers
"Restorers on the verge of extinction" was the title, last March 30, of an article by Monica Pieraccini published in the Florentine edition of La Nazione. The journalist reported how before the crisis, in Florence alone, there were at least four ...Read more...
For Genovesino, a fine research exhibition in Piacenza on his relations with the city
The Genovesino and Piacenza exhibition that recently opened in the rooms of Palazzo Galli, a valuable exhibition venue of the Banca di Piacenza, is more than just an appendix born on the heels of the success of the successful monographic exhibiti...Read more...
Jan Fabre, the warrior of beauty who dialogues with the great masters of the past
The traveler who had happened to be in Florence in 2016, during the warm weather, and to be exact between April 15 and October 2, would have come across an unusual presence in Piazza della Signoria: the space in front of the monument of Cosimo I ...Read more...
Heritage School, nomination flop certifies embarrassing lack of clarity
Last March 12, a press release from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism circulated the number of applications for the selection of the eighteen students who will take part in the first cycle of the Heritage School course: four hundred i...Read more...
The Last Caravaggio: a spectacular and provocative exhibition in Milan that puts Caravaggio in a corner
Do not make the mistake of being misled by the title: the exhibition The Last Caravaggio. Heirs and New Masters not only has little to do with the great Michelangelo Merisi (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610), but even questions, as a substantial ...Read more...
Spring Days and public heritage: a response to the vice president of FAI
Dear Vice President Magnifico, I learn, from the Emergenza Cultura review, of your response to the article with which I tried to highlight the sad reality behind the celebratory narrative of the FAI Spring Days. I must say that I am gladdened ...Read more...
The sad reality behind FAI Spring Days. What the celebrations don't say
As has been the case every year since 1993, the arrival of warm weather brings with it the FAI Spring Days, and the approach of the event is accompanied by the usual florilegium of articles with encomiastic tones that, in every headline, celebrat...Read more...
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an elegant Caravaggio between Genoa and Spain on display at Palazzo Spinola
Three works of exceptional quality, three variants on the same theme (that of the Holy Family), three paintings that speak of an artist, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Viterbo, 1587 - Rome, 1625), eager to escape for some time from the fierce competition ...Read more...
How is culture fared in the administrations of 5 Stars and the Northern League? Let's take a look
The March 4 elections handed us a result more uncertain than ever and, a week after the polls closed, it is still hard to understand what the future balance in Parliament might be: however, among the scenarios still considered most probable is th...Read more...
Elisabetta Sirani, drawings and paintings of the heroine who changed the role of women in art history
Short and tragic was the parabola of the star ofElisabetta Sirani (Bologna, 1638 - 1665), an artist of exceptional virtue, daughter of that Giovanni Andrea Sirani who, from being a pupil of Guido Reni, became his closest and most faithful collabo...Read more...
How do the parties running in the March 4 elections talk about cultural heritage? We analyzed the programs
It is likely that we will remember the election campaign that is (finally) drawing to a close as the bleakest in the entire republican history. And not only for the tones to which the parties were able to arrive, but also for the discouraging absen...Read more...
The historical and archaeological art of Mariana Castillo Deball, object biographer
"My work intersects with archaeology, ethnology or history, although the discourse I create is neither linear nor a narrative history, but consists only of interrupted futures. It is an idea of a set of temporal deviations." These are the words o...Read more...
If #MeToo turns prudery and gets a 19th-century painting removed from a museum
The news goes back to the end of January: in a major British museum, the Manchester Art Gallery, by decision of director Clare Gannaway, a 19th-century painting by a late Pre-Raphaelite painter, John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849 - London, 1917), wa...Read more...
Mark Bradford's social abstraction
In the first room one was greeted by a kind of large formless mass of many colors, with blacks and reds prevailing: an oppressive, distressing mass that occupied almost the entire room and forced visitors to remain almost glued to the walls. The room...Read more...
10 priorities for the next minister of cultural heritage
In the past four years, since Dario Franceschini has held the position of minister of cultural heritage, the sector has undergone momentous changes. There has been the reform of superintendencies, the reform of museums, the reform of the export o...Read more...
One idea: abolish free Sundays at the museum and think about more targeted offers and initiatives
It happens, during the first Sunday of the month, the one on which for almost four years the rite offree opening of all state museums, strongly desired by Minister Dario Franceschini, has been celebrated, that there are tourists who, once past the ...Read more...
How people collected between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the beautiful exhibition Voglia d'Italia in Rome
To tell the story of the origins, the development and the entry into the public patrimony of a collection that two American spouses assembled between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in the context of a newly-bor...Read more...
Miracles Square behind the scenes: talks Gianluca De Felice, secretary of the Opera della Primaziale
More than three million visitors in 2017 (3,237,766 to be precise) making it one of the most visited sites in Italy, a turnover of about fourteen million euros totally allocated to conservation and promotion, effective flow management, lively cultura...Read more...
On the annoying hoax of migrants acting as guides in museums instead of Italians
"On online hatred against immigrants one could collect real anthologies. Between artfully put into circulation hoaxes, xenophobic Facebook pages and irresponsible politicians who, in order to make propaganda, daily feed a racist and intolerant fo...Read more...
The bizarre charm of Arcimboldo's works, on display in Rome
One of the last works we know of Giuseppe Arcimboldi, the great sixteenth-century artist also known, more simply, as Arcimboldo (Milan, 1527 - 1593), is one of his highly original self-portraits on paper, preserved today at the Gabinetto dei Dise...Read more...
No more work disguised as volunteer work in cultural heritage. Bill presented to stop it
Today, in the Chamber of Deputies, activists from the campaign Do you recognize me? I am a cultural heritage professional, the initiative created to improve the working conditions of cultural professors, presented the proposed law for the regulation ...Read more...
Rebuilding Temple G at Selinunte? Old and wrong idea: Brandi and Bianchi Bandinelli already said so
The idea of rebuilding Selinunte's Temple G, revived yesterday by Vittorio Sgarbi, who since November has been the new culture councillor of the Sicilian regional government and who throughout the election campaign has flaunted the hypothesis of reco...Read more...
Bernini exhibition at Rome's Galleria Borghese, amid highs and lows
Exactly four hundred years have passed since a barely nineteen-year-old Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples, 1598 - Rome, 1680) delivered, to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, the Saint Sebastian now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Ma...Read more...
For a thoughtful reading of the 50 million visitors to museums: here are the real effects of reform
In the past few days, Minister Dario Franceschini has lavished, in decidedly emphatic tones, data on the influx of visitors to Italian museums in 2017: we are talking about a record 50 million visitors who, last year, visited our state institutes...Read more...
Canova, Hayez and Cicognara: in Venice, three greats for an urgently topical exhibition
The most interesting, valuable and profitable way to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of a museum is to retrace the first years of its history through a sensible exhibition, far from any futile rhetorical intentions, set up on a path cap...Read more...
Discounts at the Egyptian Museum for Arabic speakers? A smart initiative that promotes inclusion
The writer has long believed that the crude mantra of "Italians first" is one of the main factors polluting current political debate. This demagogic and rambling litany, however, takes on decidedly more obnoxious contours when applied to culture,...Read more...
Albissola Marina's Jorn House Museum, a poem of spontaneity
The road that starts from the seaside village and climbs the hills that serrano it from behind, among palm trees, olive trees and dry stone walls, led in the 1950s to a wasteland and an abandoned farmhouse, dating from who knows what era. Those s...Read more...
Giorgio de Finis speaks: the MACRO Asylum? A living museum, a contemporary secular cathedral
Giorgio de Finis was appointed in recent days as the new artistic director of MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. This is important news, because Giorgio de Finis will bring to life a never-before-experienced project that will transform th...Read more...
Galileo Revolution: in Padua, four centuries of art and science summed up in exhibition
When in 1610 Galileo Galilei (Pisa, 1564 - Arcetri, 1642) left Padua for the coveted Florence to take up the post of "Primary Mathematician and Philosopher of the Grand Duke of Tuscany," there were not a few in the Venetian city who regretted the g...Read more...
The City of the Lantern: an exhibition on Genoa, its symbol, and its potential
Retracing eight centuries of Genoa 's history through the images of its best-known symbol, the Lantern, in an exhibition that the city is dedicating for the first time to the celebrated lighthouse, the tallest in the entire Mediterranean: this is...Read more...
Mayor Appendino, don't touch the Turin Art Library. #savegamBIS
Maintaining culture in good health is equivalent to taking care of a human body: if one of its organs suffers, it is the body itself in its entirety that will suffer painful consequences. The loss of a library is thus not only an unpleasant event for...Read more...
Bound by a girdle: in Prato, the (excellent) exhibition on the cult of the sacred girdle
If we wanted to picture Prato at the dawn of the thirteenth century, we would have to recall the image of an industrious city, at the height of its economic and demographic growth, organized as a free commune from the beginning of the twelfth cen...Read more...
The petition against Balthus is an act of imbecile violence, but the issue to think about is a different one
The article you are about to read is the result of long reflection. Not so much on the content, for that would have sprung up almost on the spur of the moment, as on whether or not to publish it: In fact, before doing so, we wondered whether it might...Read more...
Imitation of Christ, Roberto Cuoghi's work that stunned everyone at the 2017 Biennale
"God is dead," came to mind as we walked through the imposing work that Roberto Cuoghi (Modena, 1973) presented at the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale, which ended a few days ago. Dead and lying on a morgue table, disfigured, in an advanced s...Read more...
Don't worry, the Laurentian Library will not close. But the problem of libraries exists
All it took was a partially misrepresented Corriere della Sera article, a few catchy relaunches with shrewd choices of verbs and nouns to create alarmism, and the natural disinclination of most social media users to delve deeper, to give rise to ...Read more...
Carlo Bononi's dreams in 17th-century Ferrara on display at Palazzo dei Diamanti
There is a particularly apt anecdote to give a measure of the greatness of the genius of Carlo Bononi (Ferrara, c. 1580 - 1632), the great painter to whom Ferrara is dedicating its first monographic exhibition this year, at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. ...Read more...
Great Damien Hirst: with your show in Venice, you fooled us all
The history of fake archaeological finds is at least as old as the interest in archaeology. Already Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo's first biographer, recounted that the genius of Caprese "set himself to make of marble a God of love," so similar to an...Read more...
The emotion of the sign, from Capogrossi to Perilli, Pijuan to Barnils
In 1961 Feltrinelli released one of Gillo Dorfles' best-known texts, the seminal Ultime tendenze nell'arte di oggi: the first chapter of the essay, intended to offer readers a compendium of contemporary art from the postwar period onward, was ent...Read more...
Genovesino in Cremona, the first time of an imaginative and versatile seventeenth-century painter
In the autumn of 1647, the quiet existence of the city of Cremona, which had experienced nearly two decades of relative calm after the great Manzoni plague, found itself disturbed by the events of the Franco-Spanish war. Cremona, the most important p...Read more...
The Florentine sixteenth century, lascivious and pious, at Palazzo Strozzi: much substance beyond the spectacle
In 1584, playwright and art writer Raffaello Borghini (Florence, 1541 - 1588) published a treatise in the form of a dialogue "in which painting and sculpture are discussed," and he set it at the "Riposo," the villa that Bernardo Vecchietti, a pat...Read more...
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the first monograph on the great protagonist of the 14th century
To get an idea of how important and how much esteem the art of the great Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Siena, c. 1290 - 1348) has enjoyed since ancient times, a simple exercise might suffice: scrolling through Lorenzo Ghiberti 's Commentarii and dwelling on t...Read more...
If we feel touched on fascist monuments, perhaps we still have some unfinished business
Finding a single answer to the question launched by the already widely discussed New Yorker article signed by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wondered why so many monuments of the Fascist twenty-year period still exist in Italy, is a virtually impossible tas...Read more...
Hands down: on the grotesque zumba session at Turin's Egyptian Museum
Every self-respecting vacation village always includes in its staff the baleful figure of theimportunate tourist entertainer. The one who, to put it bluntly, strives and struggles to involve in his activities, in more or less coercive ways, the u...Read more...
Plinio Nomellini, the song of the most lyrical symbolism on display in Versilia
"The charge I have had on behalf of the Academy is to pray to the Tribunal that it may restore to art one of the finest intelligences, of the most fruitful workers, a young man who is destined for a great future and who, besides doing honor to hi...Read more...
Domenico Piola in Genoa, an engaging exhibition for a Baroque protagonist
In the broad context of a national exhibition scene that often leaves something to be desired, taken as it is by following the reasons of marketing more often than those of scientific rigor, and increasingly accustomed to cutting off from the major c...Read more...
Get off your ass and see the show: Luca Bizzarri's invitation poses a serious problem
One could turn a blind eye to the first proposal of the new president of the Fondazione Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, actor and comedian Luca Bizzarri, who at his inauguration last week proposed moving Paganini's violin from Palazzo Tursi to Palazzo D...Read more...
In Vicenza, here's Van Gogh between the wheat and the sky: Marco Goldin's latest exhibitionrapanettone
Before beginning to discuss the van Gogh exhibition in Vicenza, the new exhibition-entrepreneurial project of Marco Goldin and his Linea d'Ombra, a brief premise must be advanced: this time the starting point would not be, as with some of his other...Read more...
Urs Fischer's work in Piazza della Signoria has nothing scatological about it. However.
Admirers of Urs Fischer assure that his Big Clay #4, the great twelve-meter-high work that plunged into Florence's Piazza della Signoria on a sunny late-summer afternoon, has nothing scatological about it: that huge pile of metal, which to most s...Read more...
The Brera Art Gallery under the management of James Bradburne: a model to look to?
Last August 9, the Pinacoteca di Brera released its"2016 Annual Report" to take stock of the past year's activities: and this is already news, since few (if any) museums publicly release reports on their activities, for the benefit of anyone who want...Read more...
Eike Schmidt speaks: this is why I chose Vienna. But now there are the Uffizi
In recent days, Austrian Culture Minister Thomas Drozda announced that the current director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, will be the next director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Eike Schmidt will therefore leave the Florentine museum at t...Read more...
Schmidt in Vienna: a campaign issue for Austria, a problem for Italy?
In order to fully understand the motivations that led the Austrian minister of culture to announce that the current director of the Uffizi Gallery, Eike Schmidt, will go in 2020 to direct the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it is necessary to loo...Read more...
Labyrinths of the heart: an exhibition in Rome on feelings in the art of Giorgione and the early 16th century
"To love without bitterness is not possible," sentenced Perottino, the unhappy lover protagonist of the first book of Pietro Bembo's Asolani, a treatise in the form of a dialogue on love, composed between 1497 and 1502 and published in 1505: it w...Read more...
Pinturicchio and the Borgias: a compelling tale on display in Rome
The visitor should not be fooled by the title that, on the surface, would seem to wink at the fiction audience, given the international resonance that the vicissitudes of the Borgias recounted in a recent and successful television series have had...Read more...
Images reinvented: how contemporary artists re-use, quote, appropriate
One of the best-known cases of reuse of anancient image incontemporary art is the celebrated Mimesis, a 1975 work by Giulio Paolini that apparently consists of a simple pair of casts of the Venus de' Medici placed opposite each other. It was poin...Read more...
Why the alderman's statement that he does not want migrants in tourist centers is of unprecedented gravity
I had to reread the sentence several times, since I found it hard to believe that, in the Italy of 2017, there was really a regional alderman capable of uttering such a monstrosity, such a concentration of absence of empathy,political inadequacy,...Read more...
Between surrealism and homage to Carlo Scarpa: the double abstraction of Michele Chiossi
In his work Le surréalisme et la peinture, André Breton offered the most direct and vivid account about the birth of the game of Cadavre exquis, or the "game on folded paper that consists of having several people compose a sentence or drawi...Read more...
Walter Valentini: the modern poetry of geometry
There is an ancient, classical and solemn mood that animates the works of Walter Valentini (Pergola, 1928). An Urbino-born artist and Milanese by adoption, like Donato Bramante. An artist accustomed to daily stepping through the doors of the Duca...Read more...
Luca Bizzarri at the Doge's Palace: let's avoid screeching and give him the benefit of the doubt
They say that the national sport of Liguria is grumbling: continuous, complaining grumbling, in these parts, is an ingrained habit, a specific character trait, and by now even a quirk, if you will. Yesterday, the appointment of Luca Bizzarri as t...Read more...
From Beccafumi to Rustichino: the surprising exhibition on the good century of Sienese painting
And so here we come to the good century of Sienese painting, and here are its most worthy masters. This formula, which Abbot Luigi Lanzi employs in his Storia pittorica d'Italia in order to introduce the chapter devoted to the most notable artists of...Read more...
About the useless red carpets that are invading Liguria
I wonder if Giovanni Toti, the governor of the Liguria region, has ever read that excellent book by La Spezia journalist Marco Ferrari entitled Mare verticale (Vertical Sea). It is a sort of initiation rite for the fine traveler who wants to vent...Read more...
Museum ticket prices: here's the real revolution we should implement
The recent changes to the admission fee schedule for the Uffizi Gallery and adjoining museums, with prices differentiated for high and low season, have brought the very issue of ticket prices back to the center of the museum debate. Beyond the c...Read more...
Companions. Contemporary declinations between memory, actions and emotions: the exhibition in Carrara
An array of clenched fists that struggled, suffered, claimed. A colorful violence of explosions filled with hope. Memories that resurface and chase each other in a present that, Loos taught, inevitably builds on the past. Strangers who travel with us...Read more...
Igor Hofbauer: dystopian Balkan visions between Hopper and RodÄenko
It must not have been an easy task for the curators of the Fuck Hof exhibition to sort through the endless production of Igor Hofbauer (Zagreb, 1974), a Croatian graphic designer and illustrator who is one of the leading figures of the contemporary u...Read more...
Long live ugliness: the aesthetics of Asger Jorn, a genius of the 20th century
At the Exhibition Center of the Albissola Museo Diffuso, the visitor is allowed to admire, displayed in a vitrine, a glazed ceramic depicting a sort of monster with deep-set eyes and a wide-open mouth, which almost seems to stare at the observer....Read more...
Why it doesn't make sense to talk about a fascist Asmara: about the Eritrean capital UNESCO heritage site
The news, just a few days ago, is now well known: Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, has entered the UNESCO World Heritage List. And that was enough for handfuls of nostalgics to claim the achievement as a recognition bestowed on "fascist Asmara," or "f...Read more...
Fabio Viale: visions beyond virtuosity
Of Fabio Viale (Cuneo, 1975) I retain a memory (albeit a rather vague one) that goes back to the 2008 Carrara Biennial, when the Piedmontese artist brought to the shadow of the Apuan Alps one of his white marble sculptures that reproduced a paper air...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi: talking with Marco Ciatti about the work and the restoration
The Canons Regular of St. Augustine probably did not imagine that the painting they commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452 - Amboise, 1519) in 1481 would never be finished. Quite the contrary: they waited for years for the great Renaissance...Read more...
Jeff Koons' waffling gift for Paris is having a lot of trouble
A popular assumption states that when giving a gift, what really counts is the thought. Last November Jeff Koons probably took the saying very literally when he announced that he would donate one of his sculptures to the city of Paris as a tribute to...Read more...
From cultural heritage minister Franceschini a somewhat belated call for unity
"The PD was born to unite, to overcome divisions." Scanning this statement was the minister of cultural heritage, Dario Franceschini, in an interview published yesterday in Repubblica. The call for unity, somewhat belated, comes in the aftermath ...Read more...
What is the problem with holding a dance in the courtyard of Brera when the museum is closed?
The question with which I decided to title this article is obviously rhetorical. In reality, the problems are there. A museum should be a basis for building our sense of citizenship and not simply a location for shows intended for so-called VIPs, or ...Read more...
From Article 9 traitors to Isis: it's an attack on art. Simona Maggiorelli's latest book
In the fall of 2015, Antonio Natali, who was preparing to hand over the directorship of the Uffizi to Eike Schmidt, gave one of his last interviews as director to a program on the La 7 network: Questioned as to why art is destroyed (the reference w...Read more...
Filippo Parodi's sculptures at Villa Faraggiana: the spectacle of Baroque in wood
A sumptuous room for festivities, open to the lush and orderly garden, decorated with stucco and frescoes, and endowed with a majolica tiled floor, as well as a precious set of sculptures: such was the guise that, in 1750, the future doge of Genoa, M...Read more...
Bill Viola, the electronic Renaissance in Florence: the hymn to expectation
One of the surely most interesting moments of the major retrospective that Palazzo Strozzi dedicates to Bill Viola (New York, 1951), is definitely the impact with the public. It hardly happens to see, in an exhibition, groups of people (among them mo...Read more...
Domenico Guidi's Dream of St. Joseph: the other theatrum sacrum of Santa Maria della Vittoria
The story of the Capocaccia chapel, which opens in the right transept of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, just opposite the Cornaro chapel that houses Gian Lorenzo Bernini'sEcstasy of Saint Theresa, also includes a violent altercatio...Read more...
In Praise of Beauty: twenty masterpieces to celebrate one of Italy's most beautiful museums
How could one integrate the collection that engineer Amedeo Lia, a fine and passionate art collector, donated in its entirety to the City of La Spezia in 1995, allowing the city to open the rich museum that now bears his name? This question is pr...Read more...
Tar and museum directors: overcome divisions to work towards the future
I have just finished reading, in Corriere della Sera, an interview with Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the only one of the six directors affected by the Tar's ruling to save himself from the annulment of the appointment, due to a formal flaw in the appeal. An ...Read more...
Decoding: how Giuseppe Linardi shatters and interprets reality
"Decoding, that is the key word in my work in painting today. These paintings, over the years, have gone through different techniques and subjects, from still life to landscape to large hyperrealistic portraits. Today I dissect, decompose, transfigur...Read more...
Warhol vs. Gartel: the fun tamarrism contest in Lucca
In the not-too-distant past, one of the greatest contemporary Italian writers wondered whether Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, 1928-New York, 1987) could be ascribed to the category of the tamarins, and the answer could only be soundly assertive. Indeed...Read more...
On the highway toll booth model for the Trevi Fountain: Virginia Raggi reconsiders
Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome, must have recently been on a visit to the Tower of London: there, the visitor who wants to look at the Crown Jewels is forced to pass on a treadmill that prevents stopping in front of the precious collection. Or, more p...Read more...
Lorenzo Lotto's portraits at the Pinacoteca di Brera
On April 19, 1543, Lorenzo Lotto (Venice, c. 1480 - Loreto, 1556/57) noted in his Book of Miscellaneous Expenses that he had received from "magnifico misser Febbo da Bressa," "per parte de li contra scrittj sua retrattj," the sum of "ducatj diece," "...Read more...
Sister Plautilla Nelli: at the Uffizi the works of Florence's first woman painter
What can one say about Plautilla Nelli (Florence, 1524 - 1588), the nun-artist to whom the Uffizi dedicates an interesting monographic exhibition, without falling into the petty rhetoric that speaks, perhaps a little too rashly, of ante litteram...Read more...
With export reform, we will no longer have control. Interview with Anna Stanzani
On Wednesday, we brought you the first interview on the reform of the export of cultural property. What follows is the second one, which gives voice to a personality opposed to the new legislation: she is Anna Stanzani, an art historian, among the mo...Read more...
What is the point of moving two masterpieces by Antonello da Messina for an international summit?
It's business asusual. According to choices as always imposed without a serious to in-depth dialogue with insiders and local communities, two masterpieces by Antonello da Messina, theAnnunciata from Palazzo Abatellis and the so-called Portrait of...Read more...
Morandi? He would be happy seeing his works going around the world. Interview with Leonardo Piccinini
In the coming days, the competition bill, which contains changes to the Cultural Heritage Code regarding the circulation and export of goods, will be voted on in the Senate.This is a real reform that has been causing debate among operators for mo...Read more...
Ancient statues on zinc plates and tar inserts: Luca Pignatelli on display in Carrara
Luca Pignatelli (Milan, 1962) is an artist rather reluctant to discuss with critics the meaning his works imply and conceal. He recalled this himself at the presentation of his solo exhibition in Carrara, at Palazzo Cucchiari, and the former director...Read more...
Guercino's theater of the affections between classical and natural: the Piacenza exhibition
Among the great Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, perhaps Giovanni Francesco Barbieri da Cento, better known as Guercino (Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666), is the one who best exerts his ascendancy over a vast public: certain merit of the gr...Read more...
The extraordinary (and true) beauty of women by Tano D'Amico
Thirty-four years of women on the front lines. Of women who have struggled, are struggling and will continue to struggle to gain rights and improve their own (and often men's) condition. Thirty-four years of heated passions, of intense loves, of ...Read more...
Marcialla's fake Michelangelo: a case mounted on thin air
A Michelangelo fresco discovered in the countryside in Florentine Chianti. The news, put in these terms (i.e., the way certain media have titled it, with a good dose of sensationalism), would be truly epoch-making: however, as happens whenever th...Read more...
Great images are like slabs of the souls of those who created them: interview with Tano D'Amico
Last March 31, the exhibition "The Struggle of Women" by Tano D'Amico, one of the most important contemporary Italian photographers, opened in Castelnuovo Magra, at the Tower of the Castle of the Bishops of Luni. The artist was present at the opening...Read more...
Closed number to art cities and monuments? A way to hide the problems
In one of his most interesting speeches in recent days, the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Dario Franceschini, welcomed the idea of regulating access to Venice's busiest places. A hypothesis that pleases the administration of the Venetian capital: th...Read more...
Time discovering the truth: a certificate of solidarity from Domenico Fiasella to Artemisia Gentileschi?
March 4 marked the end of theFiasellesco year, celebrated to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the commission of the celebrated altarpiece with St. Lazarus asking the Virgin Mary for protection for the city of Sarzana, entrusted to Domeni...Read more...
Arturo Dazzi: an exhibition to recover an artist doomed by history
It should not move one to wonder that the figure of one of the greatest artists of his time such as Arturo Dazzi (Carrara, 1881 - Pisa, 1966) is today almost unknown, and even in his hometown low is the number of those who are able to enumerate some ...Read more...
On Bill Viola's nude protests and our idea of art.
While in the past few days the attention of part of the world of cultural heritage was being catalyzed by an insubstantial and vacuous editorial by the president of a well-known association, in Florence, amid the indifference of most, something m...Read more...
Animals, myths, poetry: the elegance of Sinibaldo Scorza on display in Genoa
To the various pieces that, in recent years, have contributed to the reconstruction of the lively and multiform artistic and cultural reality of seventeenth-century Genoa, and particularly that of the first three decades of the century (among the...Read more...
A jewel from public to private: the recent history of Palazzo Serra Gerace in Genoa
Two weeks are left until the first 2017 edition of Rolli Days, the now famous event that opens the doors of Genoa's historic palaces, including those that were not enrolled in the so-called"rolli" from which the event takes its name. During the two...Read more...
Daniele da Volterra: d'Elci paintings on display at Corsini Gallery
It may have been the fault of the unusual warmth of a Roman evening at the end of February, or the messy traffic of people and vehicles on the Lungotevere at the end of the day, or again (and more likely) the close relevance of the assumptions ...Read more...
Ferris wheel behind the Tower of Pisa? There was no need for it
The news is from a few days ago: the Pisa City Council approved the project for the construction of a Ferris wheel with a view of the Leaning Tower. The wheel will have a height of fifty-six meters (the same as the Tower) and will be located in t...Read more...
Not the usual Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition: a reading of the Palazzo Braschi review
In order to approach the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi and her time, underway at the Museum of Rome until May 7, in the most correct way, the first necessary condition is to get rid of any preconceptions: before crossing the threshold of Palaz...Read more...
Between self-referentiality and empty rhetoric: the MiBACT budget made in Franceschini
In the age of Power Point politics, it is entirely to be expected that a minister of the republic, now in his third year in office, instead of asking himself what has not worked in that time and what can be improved, will waste and waste time having ...Read more...
Napoleonic requisitions and art to awaken consciences: the Universal Museum on display in Rome
Of all the exhibitions seen at the Scuderie del Quirinale, perhaps The Universal Museum. From Napoleon's Dream to Canova is the most ambitious, and certainly one of the most appealing to a public eager to break out of the logic of the blockbuster...Read more...
Drawings of spectacular Baroque architectural settings between Rome and Flanders
Documenting the way in which the Roman Baroque taste spread, during the seventeenth century (but also beyond) and with regard to the fields of sculpture and architecture, in the southern Netherlands, a territory corresponding roughly to today's Belgi...Read more...
Our Lady of the Rosary by John Anthony Cybei: a splendid processional machine.
A splendid "machine of the Blessed Virgin Mary." It is with this expression that an ancient document identifies the marvelous Madonna del Rosario by Giovanni Antonio Cybei (Carrara, 1706 - 1784), a complicated papier-mâché work with a woode...Read more...
Palestrina's Pieta: the most famous work not by Michelangelo
It was 1756 when the Prenestine historian Leonardo Cecconi, in his Storia di Palestrina (History of Palestrina), gave an account of a Pietà that was then in the church of Santa Rosalia, and to be precise in the Barberini chapel: it was described a...Read more...
A few words about the new directors of the ten national museums
As is well known, in the past few hours the appointments of the ten new directors of national museums have been issued, adding to the twenty appointed in 2015. You have probably also already read the names: Andrea Bruciati (Villa Adriana and Vi...Read more...
Picasso and Rousseau, November 1908: a memorable dinner
Honneur à Rousseau. Honor to Rousseau. The banner hangs on the top floor of the Bateau-Lavoir, the Montmartre building in which Pablo Picasso set up his studio some time ago. All around are streamers and flags, and in the center of the room a tabl...Read more...
From Group 63 to Group 70: in Spezia staged the moving reunion of a group of losers
What is theavant-garde? For Nanni Balestrini (Milan, 1935), the definition can be broken down and then succinctly summarized with a few basic words. Research. Experiments. Magical revelations. Extraordinary experiments. Of the future. The future. All...Read more...
Giovanni dal Ponte at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence: embarking on a risky road?
Four and a half years after the Uffizi's memorable Bagliori Dorati exhibition,late Gothic art is back in the spotlight in an institution of the former Polo Museale Fiorentino, the Galleria dell'Accademia, with an exhibition dedicated to one of the mo...Read more...
ValoreMuseo: the contest where you work at the museum, get paid with vouchers, and win ... a trip!
It was not enough, with respect to young graduates in the cultural heritage sector, to mock the call for civil service in museums with its offer of work disguised as volunteer work. No: we managed to reach an even lower point. The day before yesterda...Read more...
What's behind Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch
Gombrich said that when we look at a painting (or a work of art in general), we often don't think about the enormous efforts, sacrifices, and sleepless nights that an artist has spent studying a detail, choosing the right shade of color for a detail,...Read more...
From Signorini to De Nittis, Viareggio: high expectations, underwhelming exhibition
After last year's excellent exhibition dedicated to Silvestro Lega, expectations for the 2016-2017 appointment of the Matteucci Center for Modern Art Foundation in Viareggio could only be decidedly high. Not least because, for this year's exhibit...Read more...
"Usodimare": the poetry of the sea by Giovanni Frangi
Singing the poetry of the sea. Not an easy task, for which a visceral love for the sea is indispensable, one that also manages to substantiate itself in an intense, passion-filled, continuous, close relationship. Free man, always you will love the se...Read more...
On criticism of Time is out of joint. Interview with Cristiana Collu
We bring you today, as the first article of 2017, a lengthy interview with Cristiana Collu, director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, on the criticism received by the Time is out of jointproject , the Gallery's new exhi...Read more...
Ai Weiwei at Palazzo Strozzi: the exhibition of a modern Michelangelo?
Is there, on the contemporary scene, an artist who, in terms of power, strength of message, vitality, originality, can somehow be compared to Michelangelo? It is a difficult question to answer, but if we had to express a shortlist of candidates, we...Read more...
Marco Cornini's soulless mannequins on display in Massa
As a young boy I was an avid reader of Wolf Albert. I remember that, in an issue about fifteen years ago, a Christmas story had been published in which the farm animals, as the holidays approached, had begun to protest against Santa Claus, guilty o...Read more...
If paintings could talk, they would say fewer jibes than their creator
If we were to try to enter any bookstore today, we would find the literary labors of Stefano Guerrera (the one from "If Paintings Could Talk," the Facebook page where he publishes pictures of works of art accompanied by nice - or at least such in the...Read more...
Ardengo Soffici's discoveries and massacres at the Uffizi: a complete, precise and successful exhibition
Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Picasso, Braque. And then of course he, the great protagonist, Ardengo Soffici (Rignano sull'Arno, 1879 - Vittoria Apuana, 1964). The names and prerequisites to turn the first-ever monograph...Read more...
Joos van Cleve's triptych of the Adoration of the Magi: a Flemish masterpiece in Genoa, restored
The painter Carlo Giuseppe Ratti had been rather peremptory when, in his Instruzione, a sort of eighteenth-century "tourist guide" to Liguria, he said, about the church of San Donato in Genoa, that the only notable panel, which is preserved there, is...Read more...
Piero della Francesca in Milan: that exhibition that mortifies art history
Before we start talking about the case of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Mercy, which has been split off from its Polyptych (one of the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Quattrocento) and sent to Milan for the Christmas holidays, a clarifi...Read more...
History of art criticism: the New School of Vienna (Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt)
When Alois Riegl presented in 1901 his concept of Kunstwollen, which we had discussed in the article devoted to the Vienna School of which Riegl himself was one of the leading exponents, a clear definition of what this "will to art" was through whi...Read more...
Andy Warhol in Genoa: a confusing cauldron (and maybe leave the Doge's Chapel alone)
If there is one thing to praise and admire in Luca Beatrice, the curator of the exhibition Andy Warhol. Pop Society currently underway at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, it is his persevering and courageous tenacity. And this tenacity is embodied in his...Read more...
On Castelvecchio paintings: the government may not care about art
I read with ever-growing dismay and disgust the news around the return of paintings belonging to the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, stolen in November last year, found in Ukraine, and for months still waiting to return to Italy. Bewilderment and...Read more...
Van Dyck between Genoa and Palermo: small but significant Genoese exhibition
The movement of works by great artists kept in permanent collections, especially when it comes to sending them to temporary exhibitions, is increasingly becoming a political operation before it is a scientific one. The underlying reason is quickly st...Read more...
Donatello and Michelozzo's marvelous pulpit for Prato Cathedral
Last year, on these pages, we had written about how the city of Prato is known, among other things, for the cult of the Sacred Girdle, or the belt that Our Lady allegedly gave to St. Thomas as proof of the Assumption into heaven. Or so it is believed...Read more...
Caravaggesque novelties: for the Roman Judith and the Toulouse Judith.
A document from 1602, referring to a painting by Caravaggio (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610), informs us that the great Lombard painter had received "from Ill.re sr. Ottavio Costa a bon conto d'un quadro ch'io dipingo gli venti schudi di moneta th...Read more...
Pietrasanta's "almost DalÃ": a useless exhibition with no head or tail
The name of Salvador DalÃ, who has entered the ranks of the greats of art history almost by popular acclaim, is one to use if, for an exhibition, you want to play it safe. Given, therefore, the abundant exhibition production that has made use of t...Read more...
When Donald Trump destroyed art deco sculptures and lashed out at degenerate art
I have been following Jerry Saltz's Facebook account for months now; I find filtering U.S. society through the eye of an art critic a decidedly interesting way to try to learn more about it. The day before yesterday, in the aftermath of Donald Trump ...Read more...
Against the new layout of GNAM. Interview with Claudio Gamba
Time is out of joint, the "new installation in the form of an exhibition" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, curated by Cristiana Collu, has had the effect of creating two opposing factions: that of critics and that of enthusiasts. We h...Read more...
History of art criticism: form and relations, Roberto Longhi's method
One of the most innovative and original art historians of the twentieth century was, without a shadow of a doubt, Roberto Longhi (Alba, 1890 - Florence, 1970): precocious talent (before he was thirty years old he had already written fundamental essay...Read more...
The Annunciation by Antonello da Messina: refinement, order, modernity
A girlish face, with an olive complexion and refined features of a purity difficult to find in other works of art. The deep black eyes, which, with a slightly downward gaze, communicate hesitation, lingering, shyness, perhaps even a little discomfort...Read more...
Guglielmo's cross in Sarzana: the first dated painted cross in art history
One of the most important works in the history of Western art, the earliest example of Christus Triumphans of which we have any knowledge (at least according to the date that appears on the epigraph, which sets 1138 as the date of its creation), a pa...Read more...
Valerio Castello's baroque cycle in Palazzo Balbi-Senarega in Genoa
The much credit that Valerius for so many of his worthy works had acquired, moved Signor Francesco Maria Balbi to give him the care of painting in fresco the gallery of his sumptuous palace located in the wide street, which takes its name from th...Read more...
History of art criticism: the iconology of Erwin Panofsky
The great art historian Erwin Panofsky (Hanover, 1892 - Princeton, 1968) has been considered, and continues to be considered, a continuator of the work of Aby Warburg, who in turn is considered an anticipator of Panofsky. All this is true to a certai...Read more...
Five steps to a dream: Zino's irrepressible dreams between polyvinyl spheres and 3D prints
You cannot stem the sea, "you cannot stop the sea." The phrase is stamped on a suitcase tag, the one that usually carries the number to call in case the owner loses it. But, this time, the loss is to be considered lucky, and even happier will be the ...Read more...
Museums fit in Umbria: yet another risky use of museum space
It's true: "raising awareness about the importance of motor activity" is probably the last thing on the minds of serial buffet assailants at exhibition openings, figures to whom anyone who frequents the art and museum environment is surely accustomed...Read more...
Cities of the Grand Tour: a beautiful exhibition without big names
The Giorgio Conti Foundation in Carrara continues its 2016 programming with what we can consider the year's flagship exhibition, Grand Tour Cities from the Hermitage and Apuan Landscapes from Italian Collections, curated by Sergej Androsov and Massim...Read more...
Maria Teresa Mazzei Fabbricotti: an exhibition for a rediscovered artist
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itCritics have only recently discovered the interesting figure of Maria Teresa Mazzei Fabbricotti (Florence, 1893 - Carrara, 1977), an artist who has always remained relegated to the margins of the best...Read more...
André Cadere, the subversive artist of round wooden bars
In the Paris of the early 1970s, it was not uncommon to come across a man with a bizarre appearance: tall and thin, dressed as a modern bohemian, long hair framing a face with vaguely Middle Eastern features, a gaze always absorbed to the point of lo...Read more...
Ai Weiwei's Reframe: the eternal indignation of Florentines (and Camillo Langone's rants)
It is certainly not to be discovered today that many Florentines are now pervaded by motions of indignant revulsion toward all works ofcontemporary art that dare to invade the streets and squares of the so-called "cradle of the Renaissance": the ...Read more...
Carrara: the culture of Giggi er porchettaro
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itIn today's edition of Buona domenica, the column that has long cheered the day off of La Nazione readers, Cristina Lorenzi states that Carrara's historic center "will have to be an area in which to in...Read more...
Quotes, plagiarism or data lists? The case of Sgarbi's articles
A few days ago, our friend Fabrizio Federici, an expert art historian and author of numerous essays and scholarly articles on the seventeenth century, a signature of Artribune, as well as administrator of the successful Facebook page"Mo(n)stre," rais...Read more...
History of art criticism: Aby Warburg and the origins of iconology
Thegreater the strength of the artist, the more accomplished form the predicate has, the weaker that predicate is, the more undeveloped the subject expressed in a periphrasis. So wrote the German art historian Aby Warburg (Hamburg, 1866 - 1929, real ...Read more...
Giulio Turcato at CAMeC: a story of freedom
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itAmong the most interesting exhibition events of the summer (and dare I add "nationally") one cannot but include the exhibition that CAMeC in Spezia dedicates to the seminal figure of Giulio Turcato (M...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's Sala delle Asse: a leafy arbor in the Castello Sforzesco
All those who, in Milan, visit the Castello Sforzesco, more or less halfway through find themselves, almost suddenly, in a room that is as unusual as it is evocative: above the walls, in fact, the visitor sees intricate foliage of trees and plants gr...Read more...
Salvadori and Banfo: we could have done better.
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itAfter the interesting exhibitions of Daniel Spoerri and Andrea Aquilanti, the last two "main events" of Marble Weeks remained to be reviewed: the exhibitions of Remo Salvadori (Church of Tears, Cathe...Read more...
Art and sport. Fencing according to Arturo Rietti
Long is the list of artists who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the dawn of modern sports, began to take an interest in a wide variety of sports, to the point of becoming athletes themselves: Gustave Caillebotte in his spare...Read more...
Daniel Spoerri's hard choice, contemporary and current
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itThe title of an art exhibition can be powerfully revealing. Often it is so in a negative way: those familiar with the world of exhibitions by now already know more or less what to expect from the titl...Read more...
Art and sport. Soccer according to Ugo Guidi
Art and sport. Soccer according to Ugo GuidiBologna, September 9, 1934. On the field of the Stadio Littoriale, as today's Stadio Renato Dall'Ara was then called, the return final of the Mitropa Cup was being played. Which did not have the formula dev...Read more...
Mario Vargas Llosa discovers contemporary art (flaunting ignorance and crying conspiracy)
Anyone who has had anything to do withcontemporary art (even by simply seeing a picture of a work on Facebook, for example), knows that there are many people who, when confronted with an object whose form is not immediately recognizable and whose mea...Read more...
A saucerful of colors: review of Prof. Bad Trip's exhibition
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itYes, you are right: there is not much point in writing a review of an exhibition after it has closed and therefore when it is no longer possible to go and visit it. My fault that I went to see it in d...Read more...
The average MiBACT competition candidate: 40-year-old, overspecialized, precarious. And probably desperate
A competition at the ministry marks maturity, sang CCCP. The problem is that, for candidates in the competition for 500 civil servant positions at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, maturity comes late, indeed: very late. From even a superficial ...Read more...
History of art criticism: Bernard Berenson and his method
We resume our brief history of art criticism to talk about one of the most important scholars of the past: Bernard Berenson, born Bernhard Valvrojenski (Butremanz, 1865 Florence, 1959). Originally from Lithuania and emigrating to the United States wi...Read more...
Mixed techniques, mixed eras: Andrea Aquilanti in Carrara
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itWanting to interpret the exhibition Doppio movimento (Double Movement ), which in Carrara, in the spaces of the former San Giacomo Hospital, hosts some works by Andrea Aquilanti, we could say that the...Read more...
Milo Moiré masturbates in public: a remake of Tapp-und Tastkino by Valie Export
A couple of weeks ago, news of Milo Moiré's arrest caused quite a stir when she was stopped by London police during her Mirror Box performance, which she was holding in Trafalgar Square, and then taken to a cell, where she was subjected to a twent...Read more...
On the alleged faults of archaeologists. Open letter to Mario Giordano
Dear Dr. Giordano, as I was reading the article you signed today for the newspaper Libero(All the fault of archaeologists), I could not resist the temptation to ask myself a question: what are the qualities that should belong to a good journalist?...Read more...
![An emotional Giovanni Lindo Ferretti "A cuor contento" in Spezia](https://www.finestresullarte.info/rivista/immagini/2016/thumbs/225/20160714_232542.jpg "An emotional Giovanni Lindo Ferretti "A cuor contento" in Spezia")
An emotional Giovanni Lindo Ferretti "A cuor contento" in Spezia
Article originally published on culturainrivera.it.Few musicians manage to divide the public like Giovanni Lindo Ferretti. On his account continue to clash the opinions of those who resent the stances of recent years and those who have decided to rem...Read more...
Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, the collector who donated his collection to Piacenza without asking for anything in return
Nowadays, the habit of making, at least in the area of culture, unselfish gestures moved solely by true passion is perhaps being somewhat lost. It has become normal to assume that an act performed toward culture should be matched by an appropriate re...Read more...
Squares, universities and monuments closed for VIP parties. But money shouldn't buy everything
When, exactly three years ago, Matteo Renzi, as mayor of Florence, closed Ponte Vecchio to allow a gathering of wealthy Ferraristi who had had the nice idea of dining on Florence's best-known bridge, it was hoped that it was more unique than rare. No...Read more...
A great Marble Weeks in Carrara this year.
Article originally published on culturainrivera.itI have been following, somewhat from a distance and somewhat bored, the controversy triggered by Paris Mazzanti, former director of Internazionale Marmi e Macchine, regarding the 2016 edition of Marbl...Read more...
Costantino D'Orazio strikes again: his embarrassing Florentine pearls on a trip with his aunt
For those accustomed to watching some art history on TV, the figure of Costantino D'Orazio will certainly not constitute news. On the other hand, for those who are not familiar with him, this is a ubiquitous character whose role is to popularize ar...Read more...
Christo's art, democratic and elitist at the same time?
As is well known, so much criticism has rained down on The Floating Piers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude 's work on Lake Iseo, in recent days. The problem is that very little has been said about the art, and so much about the side dish. For example: when...Read more...
Why Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Floating Piers is not a clown show
For many people commenting on the web, The Floating Piers, the large installation by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude partnership (which, after Jeanne-Claude's passing in 2009, has been reduced to the figure of Christo alone), would not be classifiable ...Read more...
We can be heroes, just for one day. David Bowie, La Spezia
Look up here, I'm in heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen / I've got drama, can't be stolen / Everybody knows me now. These are the words with which David Bowie decided to open Lazarus, his last single, released a few days before his death. A s...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man: history and meaning of a modern design
"Vetruvius architect puts in his work of architecture that the measurements of homo are of nature disstributed in this way. That is, that 4 diti makes a palm and 4 palms makes a foot; 6 palms makes a cubit, 4 cubits makes a homo, and 4 cubits makes a...Read more...
It finally comes to an end bellezza@governo.it: yet another renzian marketing tool
One of the sleaziest initiatives hatched from the mind of the current prime minister has finally come to an end: bellezza@governo.it. That is, an e-mail address to which to send reports of cultural projects to be funded, or of cultural places in need...Read more...
#community: thirteen contemporary artists reflect on community in liquid society
Those who, until June 5, would like to enter the CAMeC in La Spezia (a city from whose toponym, as an inhabitant of the area, I carefully omit the article) to see how a group of thirteen contemporary artists questions the concept of community in toda...Read more...
From Einstürzende Neubauten to Immanuel Casto and the Soviets through Picasso, Correggio, MaleviÄ
I got to know Soviet Soviets relatively recently, that is, in 2014, when I saw them for the first time in concert, in my neck of the woods. However, they have been in activity since 2008, and since I consider them the best Italian band among thos...Read more...
Alessandro Magnasco: the anticlerical of the eighteenth century
Yes, it is true: the title of this article is deliberately provocative. However, perhaps this is the best way to pay proper tribute to the figure of Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa, 1667 - 1749) who, we make no secret of it, is one of our favorite pai...Read more...
The temples of Paestum in the engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi
The temples of Paestum had really had it rough in the 1740s. At that time, in fact, the King of Naples, Charles III of Bourbon, had recently begun some rearrangement work at the Royal Palace in the Neapolitan city, and one of the court architects, Fe...Read more...
Heritage, the network, the general public
For those who were not present in Rome last weekend, we publish below the video and full text of our Federico Giannini's speech (titled "Heritage, the Net, the General Public") as part of the conference held in Rome on May 6 for the "Emergenza Cultur...Read more...
Lucio Fontana: the origins of spatialism (and an exhibition in Lucca to understand them)
In 1946, Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968) is a forty-seven-year-old man, well aware that the world in which he is living has undergone profound changes. World War II has just ended: he has preferred to avoid it, settling ...Read more...
Art as music: the encounter between Vasily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg
Ofabstract art there is often a distorted perception: in the eyes of many people who have little familiarity with these forms of expression, abstract compositions seem almost dictated by chance, not regulated by a precise order, created through t...Read more...
Exhibitions: when exhibiting only one work makes sense
I was pleased to read, in News-Art, Michele Cuppone 'sarticle on the display of Caravaggio 's Flagellation in Monza. Not only because my book Un patrimonio da riconquistare (A Heritage to Regain) is mentioned in the article, but also and especially b...Read more...
Art criticism: pure visibility and the origins of formalism (Konrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wölfflin)
Anyone who has (or has had) anything to do with the history of art criticism must at some point or another have come across the figure of Konrad Fiedler (Öderan, 1841 - Munich, 1895), one of the greatest philosophers of art who lived in the 19th ...Read more...
About Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul
Concerning Caravaggio 's (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610) celebrated Conversion of St. Paul in the Cerasi Chapel, a painting that represents one of the Lombard artist's best-known and most discussed masterpieces, there is a widespread interpretatio...Read more...
Elles: the Parisian prostitutes according to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The great Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Albi, 1864 - Saint-André-du-Bois, 1901), as is well known, was a frequent visitor to the brothels of late 19th-century Paris. In recent times we have seen a renewed interest in this important artist, an int...Read more...
Giovanni Andrea Carlone's frescoes in the Royal Palace: a singular episode of Genoese baroque
Also by this Painter, and of his most specious frescoes, are those which stand out above the doors leading to the gallery in the palace of the Most Excellent Marcello Durazzo of the late Gio.Luca: and they represent Prometheus, who animates man; Herc...Read more...
Fear and delirium in Las Pezia: from Sgarbi (unlikely?) mayor to the long-running affairs of Verdi Square
In the country in which megaphones, more or less jammed and more or less accustomed to profanity, have sometimes proven to transform endorsement for a cause or a movement into concrete political action, there are strips of land that, for various ...Read more...
Japan according to Vincent Van Gogh
In the last months of 2012, an exhibition with the eloquent title Van Gogh, rêves de Japon, or: "Van Gogh, dreams of Japan," opened at the Pinacothèque de Paris. The exhibition aimed to document the influence thatJapanese art had exerted on the...Read more...
The suggestions of melodrama on the art of Valerio Castello
In 2008, a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Valerio Castello ( Genoa, 1624 - 1659), the greatest genius of the Genoese Baroque (and the exhibition was in fact titled Valerio Castello 1624 - 1659. Modern Genius). On that occasion, an intere...Read more...
How to attribute a painting: Adolfo Venturi and the science of connoisseurship
In his talk at the conference on the great scholar Adolfo Venturi (Modena, 1856 - Santa Margherita Ligure, 1941), held in 1992, art historian Claudio Strinati recalled how one day Venturi was in Milan visiting the home of Giovanni Morelli, who wanted...Read more...
Blue erases his Bolognese works: is the gesture part of the artwork?
At the beginning of the year, Christian Omodeo, the curator of the highly contested Bologna exhibition on street art that will open on March 18 at Palazzo Pepoli, was interviewed by Artribune about the controversy that arose around an exhibition that...Read more...
Bernini, Caravaggio, Rubens and others: those one-painting shows that destroy art history
In recent times, the scourge of so-called one-painting shows, i.e., exhibitions in which a single work of art is the protagonist, has been spreading with increasing worrying rapidity. Not necessarily a painting, as the locution, recently introduc...Read more...
Florence and the Uffizi: what future for the Vasari Corridor? Confronting positions
Those who are interested in the vicissitudes of Florentine museums will certainly not have missed the debate that has been going on in recent hours around the fate of the Vasari Corridor in Florence, which connects the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace. Tha...Read more...
Royal Palace of Caserta and instrumentalization: how to build a fake case around nothing
TheItalian public seems to be unaccustomed to source verification, that particular practice that many indicate by the anglicism fact checking and which consists, precisely, in ascertaining the veracity of certain information by going back to the sour...Read more...
Marsilio Ficino and the development of Neoplatonism in Medici Florence between reality and invention
He was also Cosimo's lover and exalter of literate men; and therefore he brought to Florence Argilopolo, a man of the Greek nation and in those times most literate, so that from him the Florentine youth might learn the Greek language and its other do...Read more...
Carrara pleads with private individuals to adopt city monuments. As maxi tax evasion is uncovered.
That Carrara has long been traversed by a climate of very high indignation towards the city's administration is a well-known fact: there are too many problems afflicting Carrara (which we have often talked about on these pages as well: environmental ...Read more...
The prehistory of humanity according to Piero di Cosimo, rereading Panofsky
The recent exhibition on Piero di Cosimo (1462 - 1522) at the Uffizi (and, even before the latter, the immediately preceding retrospective held at the National Gallery in Washington) had, among others, the merit of bringing together a good part of th...Read more...
How to attribute a painting: the Vienna School (Eitelberger, Wickhoff, Riegl, Dvořák)
In the last episode of our history of art criticism, we had talked about Julius von Schlosser (1866 - 1938) and introduced the Vienna School, the important group of scholars, of which Schlosser was one of the youngest exponents, who contributed to th...Read more...
On the correct history of the Salon, or: five mistakes by Marco Goldin (in six minutes)
For the past few weeks, posts from Linea d'Ombra, the company of the never tame Marco Goldin, have been raging on my personal Facebook wall. Italy's most prolific curator seems to have kicked off a pressing publicity battle, including on social m...Read more...
Stane Kumar, the Slovenian artist who drew children interned in Italian concentration camps
From the moment it was established, now twelve years ago, Remembrance Day has in fact cleared the most boorish and petty neo-fascist propaganda, for which it would seem that there is no memory resulting from the combination of all the events that o...Read more...
The Uffizi on the web between lights and shadows: good projects but also lots of gaps and lack of clarity
I met Eike Schmidt in person toward the end of the year, when I interviewed him for Art and Dossier (the interview came out in shortened form in the January issue and the full interview will be posted online shortly): he gave me the impression that h...Read more...
How to attribute a painting: Julius von Schlosser, the philological study of the work and that of the sources
We resume, with this article, our brief history of art criticism that we had begun with the small contributions on the figures of Giovanni Morelli and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: to introduce the topic of this new "installment" in the series, we ...Read more...
Antimo, the karateka of janitors, and Dorina, the doctor who prefers loincloths. Here are the new undersecretaries
That underlying yesterday's government reshuffle is a desire to better succor the visions of the Catholic component of the majority? The Ministry of Culture has in fact become one and three: as of yesterday we can therefore boast of having as many as...Read more...
Covered statues: here's what we should really be ashamed of
Hassan Rouhani is an intelligent man and an able politician. And he is an educated man: he even studied in Europe. It is hard to think that the statues in the Capitoline Museums, covered up not yet known by whose initiative, could have offended his s...Read more...
Cultural heritage reform, chapter 2: MiBACT's holistic view. Against its own government
Until yesterday, I had heard the adjective"holistic" pronounced in only two contexts: in advertisements for massage centers that practice, precisely, holistic massage, and in those marketing courses that, instead of aiming straight at the bottom line...Read more...
Luciano Borzone's insights, between Cesare Corte and Giovanni Battista Paggi
A couple of weeks ago we told you about some intense paintings by Luciano Borzone (1590 - 1645) that you can admire, until February 28, 2016, at the exhibition "Luciano Borzone. Vivid Painter in Early Seventeenth-Century Genoa," the first monographic...Read more...
David Bowie liked Picasso
If you find yourself discussing rock with someone who has sufficient musical culture and at the same time a certain intolerance of stars, you will most likely hear that David Bowie was not a genius because he did not invent anything. Because the ...Read more...
The Charities of Carlo Portelli, original interpreter of Florentine Mannerism
It may sound strange, but in order to better understand the development of the art of Carlo Portelli (early 1500s - 1574), an artist who has never been to Rome to our knowledge, it is necessary to start precisely from Rome: in 1539 Francesco de' ...Read more...
Jeff Koons' statue is ideal for celebrating Florence
Never missing from any self-respecting Christmas dinner is the intrusive figure of the old aunt who gives her nephew the usual, atrocious and dreaded technicolor lozenge heavy wool sweater with figures of reindeer and snowflakes. Since time immemoria...Read more...
Luciano Borzone's naturalistic flair in two intense saints.
To those not very familiar with seventeenth-century Genoese painting, the name of Luciano Borzone (1590 - 1645) will perhaps say little or nothing. Too many circumstances have played against the fortunes of this artist, beginning with the fact that h...Read more...
Giovanni Bellini's Allegory: an unsolved enigma
"It is difficult to discover the meaning of the allegory that Bellini painted. The Virgin, seated on a terrace overlooking a lake, receives the homage of a kneeling woman, accompanied to the right and left by standing figures whose identities have no...Read more...
Giotto: the Baroncelli polyptych reunited
The Milan exhibition on Giotto (1267 - 1337) had, in my opinion, one of its two peaks in the display of the Baroncelli Polyptych reunited for the occasion with the cusp of the central panel (the other peak, however, can be identified in the presence ...Read more...
Francesco Hayez and his grossest woman of the vulgar in the guise of Venus
There are good margins of certainty to say that, in this day and age, we would all have ignored the name of Carlotta Chabert, a mid-nineteenth-century ballerina, were it not for one specific circumstance: the fact that she was the mistress of a wealt...Read more...
Is it right to change the titles of works in the name of political correctness? The case of the Rijksmuseum
Until the 19th century, it was very rare, if not almost impossible, to find artists who chose a specific title for one of their works. As a result, the designations by which we are now familiar with a great many masterpieces, even world-famous ones, ...Read more...
How to attribute a painting: Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and the method of intuition
In the first "installment" of this small series of articles devoted to the history of connoisseurship, we had made a very quick reference (highlighted mainly in the comments to the discussion that arose around the same article) to an important te...Read more...
The other Venus of the Uffizi: the human and natural goddess of Lorenzo di Credi
Lorenzo di Credi, Venus (c. 1490-1494; oil on canvas, 151 x 69 cm; Florence, Uffizi) Lorenzo di Credi 's very special Venus could have had no other fate than oblivion: the solidity of her proportions, which in certain anatomical details would...Read more...
A significant portrait by Bronzino: the dwarf Braccio di Bartolo, known as Morgante
He then portrayed Bronzino to Duke Cosimo Morgante naked dwarf all whole, et in two ways, that is, on one side of the painting the front and on the other the back, with that extravagance of monstrous limbs that dwarf has, which painting in that genre...Read more...
Talking in Italy about cultural heritage and protection: is it stuff for old men?
In an article that appeared on November 30 in Articolo 21, Vittorio Emiliani sketched what, in his opinion, would seem to be a desolating panorama of theinformation on cultural heritage that can be found in the media nowadays: it would be, in oth...Read more...
How to attribute a painting: Giovanni Morelli and his sigla motifs
When newspapers present us with a new artistic discovery, we always witness the stances of various scholars, who either take sides in favor of an attribution to a particular artist, or take completely contrary views, tracing the work back to othe...Read more...
Andy Warhol: a critic or a celebrant of consumer society?
Everything has been written about Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), but despite this, several questions still remain about many aspects of his art. There is one, in particular, that divides scholars dealing with his work: was Andy Warhol a disenchanted and ...Read more...
Do thieves in Italy love art more than politicians and the media?
With this article, with its deliberately provocative title, I would like to return to the subject of the robbery at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, also in light of the latest developments in the affair: we feel it is our duty to continue to focu...Read more...
The Castelvecchio Museum robbery: a wound that will not be easy to heal
We at Windows on Art have visited Verona's Castelvecchio Museum many times-we consider it one of our favorite museums. So it was a very hard blow to read, this morning, the news of the egregious robbery that allowed a gang of thugs to steal sevente...Read more...
Carrara, the city where the administration wants to tear down all the old bridges in the historic center
When you want to refer to a union, a passage or a connection, I think the most commonly used image is that of the bridge. But the bridge is also a metaphor for change, for life flowing and being renewed. Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine / Et no...Read more...
The Archaic Eroticism of AgustÃn Cárdenas
To describe the imagery and art of the Cuban sculptor AgustÃn Cárdenas (1927 - 2001), it is possible to use a metaphor that is not new to his sculpture, but nonetheless effective. It is necessary to imagine making love to a woman (necessarily...Read more...
Pretend you know about art, and put a like on Jeff Koons
It took Tomaso Montanari and Pablo Echaurren to unravel the usual skein of lavish, unconditional but mostly prone and clueless praise that accompanied yet another arrival in Italy of an artist who enjoys minimal international fame: and, as far as the...Read more...
The Malatesta Temple in Rimini: a family mausoleum mirroring the ambitions of Sigismondo Malatesta
It is a bit like entering a pagan temple. And in some ways even a sumptuous aristocratic residence, if you prefer. What is certain is that the sacred and the religious seem to be relegated to a marginal role: these are the feelings one gets when ...Read more...
1878: when French Impressionism first came to Italy.
The arrival ofFrenchImpressionism, in Florence and Italy, occurred during a very specific occasion: the Florentine Promotrice exhibition of 1878. The Promotrice was a society, established in Florence in 1843 as the Società Promotrice delle Bel...Read more...
Why is Gustave Caillebotte not as famous as the other Impressionists?
When thinking of the Impressionists, most tend to enumerate the typical textbook names: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, sometimes Sisley and Pissarro. After all, the painters just mentioned can be considered the masterminds of what is perhaps the be...Read more...
Simone Cantarini's drawings: peculiarities and main characteristics
Often, "laymen" are wont to attribute a lower value to drawings than to paintings: but drawing is a fundamental means of understanding the dynamics of the artist's creative process and of getting to know his style better, as well as of drawing import...Read more...
The nymph of Piero di Cosimo: an elegy on panel.
Any art history textbook in which the figure of Piero di Cosimo (1462 - 1522) is outlined certainly does not discount his eccentric and, as Federico Zeri had to add, unconventional nature: they all report the oddities and quirks of his character....Read more...
Cultural heritage among essential public services: change of course or hypocrisy of Renzi and Franceschini?
With the usual demented practice ofannouncement on social networks and by press release, without, however, releasing the full text of the measure, yesterday the Council of Ministers approved the decree-law, consisting of a single article, which state...Read more...
Union assembly at the Colosseum: the measure is full should workers say so
Still, after a normal union assembly of the workers of the Special Superintendence for the Colosseum (SSCol) in Rome, legitimately and regularly communicated a week ago, we have to witness the screeches of our politicians, who just don't like the i...Read more...
Literary festivals: love of culture or social events? Meanwhile, letters and art suffer...
We have to say it: we really like literary festivals. So, when we do, we try to attend them. The dates have multiplied, the lectures and presentations are almost always of high quality, and on the side there are always lots of really interesting even...Read more...
The Contrari Chapel: the heretical chapel of the Fortress of Vignola
Among the walls of the Rocca di Vignola, there is a chapel full of charm and filled with symbolic references, which allows us to take a journey through centuries of history: it is the Contrari Chapel, whose events probably began in the third decade o...Read more...
Challenges and problems for new museum directors: the most important aspects
The affair of new museum directors, which we have also discussed on several occasions and given ample space to both in our press review and on our Facebook page, continues to hold the headlines and to be the constant focus of attention of a now very ...Read more...
The government's inelegance and failures on the issue of new museum directors
When faced with the eventuality of having to replace with fresh forces, for whatever reason, a worker who has always performed his or her duties admirably, there are two options. The one widely practiced consists of sincerely thanking the person be...Read more...
New state museum directors: will they be enough to trigger real change?
If one were to derive a message from the appointment of the twenty directors of the new state museums, whose names were published this morning on the MiBACT website, that message would speak of a radical break with the past-but up to a point. Tha...Read more...
The damage caused by the ridiculous dichotomy between humanistic culture and scientific culture
The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in his 1974 essay, The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities ("The Divorce between the Sciences and Humanistic Culture"), identifies in the thought of the antiscientist philosophers of the eighteenth c...Read more...
Giorgione's Sunset, one of the most striking landscapes in art history
If I had to name two or three of the most fascinating painters in the history of art, on one name I would have no doubt, and I would assign a place in this special ranking to Giorgione. It is of him that I want to tell you about in this post.... or r...Read more...
The all-out strike at the National Gallery in London. Which, in Italy, no one is talking about
While, here in Italy, many are still squabbling over the Pompeii workers'union assembly that raised a (pointless) fuss in late July, in London some 200 National Gallery employees belonging to the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union have decl...Read more...
The sea and beaches of Ettore Tito, the Paolo Veronese with kodak
When Ettore Tito (1859 - 1941) exhibited his marvelous work July, which had just been completed, at the 1894 Esposizioni Riunite in Milan, the writer Leone Fortis, who dedicated a book to those Expositions, described the painting as a "scene of bathi...Read more...
Madia bill is law: huge risks for art, culture and landscape. But we hope for unconstitutionality.
Despite appeals, articles and choruses of authoritative voices against it, yesterday the Madia bill was approved in the Senate and thus became law. Of course, it is a proxy law and, to see it in full operation, it will be necessary to wait for th...Read more...
How a sixteenth-century painter painted: the technique of Palma the Elder
At the recent exhibition on Palma the Elder (c. 1480 - 1528, real name Jacopo Negretti), held at GAMeC in Bergamo, there was on display, among others, an important and interesting painting, the so-called Unfinished Portrait, kept at the Uffizi. I...Read more...
Pompeii: shameful is the attitude of those who do not consider workers' rights
In the past few hours, about theunion assembly that resulted in a partial closure of the Pompeii excavations this Friday, we have heard anything and everything. It is a pity that the media have only given relevance to the statements of the various po...Read more...
Renzi, Franceschini and Madia: scrappers of cultural heritage? Toward the dismantling of the superintendencies
As in 2014, again this year, in the middle of summer, the enemies of cultural heritage are beginning to oil the gears of their machine. In 2014, also in July, evidently taking advantage of the summer atmosphere, the close vacations and the conseque...Read more...
Daedalus and Icarus: painting by Girolamo Riminaldi, a singular merchant-painter, on display in Carrara
Pariter praecepta volandi / tradit et ignotas umeris accomodat alas. / Inter opus monitusque genae maduere seniles, / et patriae tremuere manus. "While teaching him to fly, behind his back he applied those wings he had never seen. And between th...Read more...
A mega panoramic elevator leaning against the Colosseum. Science fiction? No, possible effect of the Madia DDL
Rome, end of 2016. The junta led by Ignazio Marino, overwhelmed by yet another aftermath of the Mafia Capitale investigation, falls thunderously. In its place takes office a mayor from the renzian area who, to boost (according to him) the world image...Read more...
The return of the superfluous: the bad initiatives of the Michelangelo Week in Florence
For some time now in Italy there has been the baleful custom of celebrating anniversaries concerning famous artists (births, deaths, realizations of famous works of art and whatnot) with the most atrocious gimmicks, which in the intent of those org...Read more...
Vittorio Sgarbi's petition: interesting initiative, but to be set in other terms
Perhaps it is not yet the case that we prefer Vittorio Sgarbi in the guise of a "mover of works of art," as Tomaso Montanari recently called him, but we can certainly say that, as a polemicist, good Vittorio seems to lack the refinement that such a d...Read more...
Marina Abramovic and Ulay's Imponderabilia: the performance that probed human behavior with nudity
In the week between June 1 and 6, 1977, the International Week of Performance, curated by Renato Barilli, took place at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna: a series of events attended by some of the world's best exponents of performance ...Read more...
Higher grades in public competitions according to home university: a discriminatory act
A lot of people have been talking about it: yesterday, the House Constitutional Affairs Committee met to discuss the Public Administration bill, and among the various amendments approved during the proceedings, there is one that has been much discu...Read more...
How useless is the competition for directors of the new state museums?
Let's start with a small premise: as is well known, soon twenty museums hitherto dependent on the Ministry of Culture and linked to their superintendencies will become autonomous. This is what was envisaged by the MiBACT reform devised last year by...Read more...
Louis Bienaimé's La Pastorella: a sweet and delicate neoclassical work
Louis Bienaimé, Shepherdess (1837; St. Petersburg, Hermitage) "A gentle Shepherdess vaguely coiffed in symmetrical group her hair, has on her forehead the most graceful thought. She meditating studiously and quietly inclines her head a little to ...Read more...
Andrea Mantegna and the San Zeno Altarpiece: the polyptych that marks the beginning of the Veronese Renaissance
One could venture a very precise date to establish the "official" beginning of the Veronese Renaissance: July 31, 1459, the day on which the celebrated San Zeno Altarpiece was placed on the high altar of the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona, in the pre...Read more...
Opens today in Casal di Principe Light conquers shadow: Uffizi art against the Camorra
Mattia Preti depicts his Vanity as a richly attired woman, with a turban framing a face invested with light and which, together with her inspired expression, is somewhat reminiscent of certain solutions by Domenichino, and with a robe covered by a li...Read more...
Art history in Renzi's good school? Hopes hanging by a thin thread. And reform slipped
Exactly one year ago, day more, day less (it was June 19), Education Minister Stefania Giannini triumphantly announced the return of art history to school: "we will introduce the study of art history, in all levels of high schools, starting from the ...Read more...
Museitaliani: MiBACT's new (ugly) video. In which they talk about protection and enhancement.
If there is one thing that the Ministry of Culture has learned to do really really well in recent years, this thing is the production of promotional videos. Especially if they are ugly. Like the very famous If You Don't Visit It We'll Take It Away, w...Read more...
Lombard art from the Visconti to the Sforza: a response to an overly ungenerous critique
In his A cosa serve Michelangelo?, Tomaso Montanari wrote, with good reason, that it has become quite difficult to read negative reviews of exhibitions in major national newspapers: only "positive or, better yet, celebratory" reviews. However, it is ...Read more...
Culture and artistic heritage: the two forgotten issues in this election campaign
The one that just passed will be remembered as one of the most pathetic election campaigns in recent history. We have seen all kinds of things: Salvini who, in between the now customary rants against immigrants, exploited images of a wounded anarchis...Read more...
From Byzantium to. Monselice: the overcoming of Byzantine art seen through the Madonnas of Milk
While wandering around the halls of Monselice Castle yesterday as part of our #villeinblue press tour, we came across a fresco depicting a Madonna of milk (i.e. depicted in the act of suckling Baby Jesus: this type of representation is also known by ...Read more...
Leonardo da Vinci draughtsman: the studies on canvas
One of the lesser-known strands of the great Leonardo da Vinci's production is drawing on canvas, which, although not practiced as frequently as drawing on paper, was nevertheless sometimes experimented with by the artist. One of the first biographer...Read more...
Isabella d'Este. The Lady of the Renaissance - by Lorenzo Bonoldi
It is not easy to keep a reader glued to a book about the relationship between Isabella d'Este and the arts: because the subject matter is not the easiest, because the history of the Mantuan Renaissance is much less well known than that of other rena...Read more...
Exhibitions in Bologna: In the Age of Correggio and Carracci by Andrea Emiliani (1986)
Andrea Emiliani is one of the most eminent figures in the history of Italian art: a great scholar, a pupil of Roberto Longhi and Francesco Arcangeli, he is also known for having been an excellent superintendent for the cultural heritage of Bologn...Read more...
What will the violence in Milan have done: perhaps, to limit our basic freedoms?
Let us start with a premise: violence is never justifiable. And starting from this premise, let us add a corollary: especially when it harms an idea to the advantage, instead, of those who deviously entrench themselves behind a familiar and reassurin...Read more...
To the origins of May Day. The Chicago martyrs (and Walter Crane's engraving celebrating them).
There will come a time when silence will be louder than the voices that today throttle(August Spies) Chicago, United States of America, May 1, 1886. Labor unions organize a strike to demand better working conditions from the bosses. In particular,...Read more...
On the immense antics of young people refusing to work at Expo: no more insults
We are used to it by now, dear young friend and dear young friend who happened upon the lines of this post: not a day goes by without there being someone whose original gimmick leaps to mind to make you out to be no-good, picky and slackers. To c...Read more...
Sgarbi and Farinetti's terrible artistic potpourri for Expo 2015. Which no one is talking about
What do Lorenzo Lotto, Francesco Cairo, Bartolomeo della Gatta and Virgilio Guidi have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, if only because they are all painters. As of these days, however, they can boast that all four have a new common trait: ...Read more...
Piero della Francesca and the importance of his treatise De quinque corporibus regularibus
It is well known that Piero della Francesca was not only an outstanding artist but also a highly accomplished treatise writer. Anyone who has studied even a modicum of Renaissance art history has always known that the great Tuscan artist wrote four t...Read more...
Giorgione. The Tempest - by Maria Daniela Lunghi
Everything has been written about Giorgione 's Tempest, but any new contribution that can help, in a serious way, to shed light on the great mystery that has been posing questions to all who observe it for centuries is always welcome. For, as is well...Read more...
Seventeenth-century Rome in the eyes of Gerrit van Honthorst: the painter's beginnings
Let us imagine a Dutch boy of just eighteen who had recently arrived in Rome. And let us imagine that this boy is none other than Gerrit van Honthorst: a young man who already had a good education, because in his homeland he had studied with Abraham ...Read more...
A provocation: let's close the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara
While there was (and still is) discussion in Carrara about the article, published on our website a few days ago, about the vicissitudes that have affected the last six years of the presidency of the city'sAcademy of Fine Arts, a new, onerous stone ha...Read more...
An idiotic approach to art: about blockbuster exhibitions
"Blockbuster exhibitions encourage an idiotic approach to art. We think we have the best possible opportunity to see a certain artist or a certain art-historical period, we think that by seeing an exhibition on Jackson Pollock or Botticelli, we w...Read more...
Goldin will not hold his exhibition in Treviso. But art still comes out defeated
"Goldin is tired of criticism, committees opposed to the use of Santa Caterina for the exhibition and art historians pontificating about the quality of his projects." So wrote, on February 24, 2015, the Treviso Tribune in an article by Alessandro Zag...Read more...
Specialized tour guides? Go work in Slovenia. Franceschini and the weakness of politics
The matter is quite well known: Italy recently had to enact a law, Law 97 of August 6, 2013, which through one of its articles (Article 3) will allow guides from other European countries to be able to practice their profession in Italy. This is to ma...Read more...
Not just Florence's National Central Library: all the ministry's cuts for 2015
An article, published yesterday in Repubblica and signed by Tomaso Montanari, in which the author rails against the cuts in funding for the National Central Library of Florence, which goes from more than one million euros in 2014 to a mere 196,397 eu...Read more...
Books: The Good of All - by Mariella Carlotti
An art history book that looks a lot like a civics book: after all, what is art history for if not to educate, as well as to excite and move minds? We could summarize in this way the interesting book The Good of All, written by Mariella Carlotti and ...Read more...
Landscape hooligans. Green light for the devastation of Tuscany?
Are you familiar withTuscan art from just about every era, from the Middle Ages to the present, via the Renaissance and the Macchiaioli? If there is a hallmark of Tuscan art that cuts across the tastes, styles, eras and personal inclinations of t...Read more...
The Barcaccia damaged by Feyenoord hooligans: can lessons be learned?
The first thing I would like to know about the damage to the Barcaccia in the Spanish Steps, a fundamental masterpiece by Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is what kind of consideration the quaestor of Rome Nicolò D'Angelo has for art. Far be it fr...Read more...
Massa's Nativity by Nightlight: the troubled story of a beautiful painting, on display
If you happen to be passing through Massa by March 15, take some time to visit the Diocesan Museum and the exhibition The Nativity by Nightlight. We had already told you about it in our first article written in The Daily Slow, and we are returning to...Read more...
Inside the Scrovegni Chapel with Roberto Longhi: the spacious Giotto and his choruses
One of the big problems we face if we decide to visit the Scrovegni Chapel is theshort time we are allowed to visit: just a quarter of an hour. Our Ilaria had already told you about this in an article in her column Museums of Italy. So, since our tim...Read more...
Very nice? Very slow and very unusable. Small and hapless technical analysis
As a technician, since my job is that of web designer and web developer, before that of popularizer, I have been asked to comment on the new project of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, verybello.it, the site that was launched in the last few hours ...Read more...
If art history is to set the stage for international summits
If there are occasions when the dichotomy betweenbeing andappearing that characterizes the actions of the politicians who govern us (clumsily, many would think) is best manifested, such occasions can be recognized in international summits. A bit like...Read more...
Treviso: a museum turned upside down and more than a million euros for the needs of a Goldin exhibition
While the world of art history (including us) debates even animatedly about Marco Goldin's exhibitionrapanettone going on in Vicenza, much more disturbing but equally Goldin-like events are taking place a few kilometers away, namely in Treviso. Vic...Read more...
Bernini's freedom: considerations after the first installment of the series
RAI is finally bringing us great art in prime time thanks to the project Bernini's Freedom, an eight-part series that, through Tomaso Montanari's narration, takes the reader through the work of one of the greatest protagonists of Italian art, Gian ...Read more...
So near and yet so far: the Adorations of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano and Lorenzo Monaco
If your name is Gentile da Fabriano, you have the wealthiest citizen of Florence as a client, and to execute your work you therefore have all the resources you need at your disposal, all you need to do is to put your innate talent and taste for decor...Read more...
Professors not taking students to Goldin's exhibition? It is not obscurantism or boycott
I have a feeling that this 2015 will bring a new cliché about art. Namely, "every exhibition deserves to be seen." A commonplace that, formulated in different variants, is gaining more and more ground. The latest to have formulated it is journalis...Read more...
On Dario Franceschini's idea of recontextualizing works of art.
As is often the case, when it comes to tourism, ideas are likely to be few and far between, but quite confusing. Today, in the Corriere della Sera, a nice interview with Minister Dario Franceschini came out, who gave us his recipe for moving tourists...Read more...
Caspar David Friedrich's art in Disney's film Fantasia.
As a child, I routinely refused to watch Disney's movie Fantasia: the one that, as you may remember, was divided into several episodes based on famous pieces of classical music, directed by Leopold Stokowski. Shortly before the end of the film, there...Read more...
If University of Foggia suppresses master's degree program in archaeology
In recent decades, there have been many authors and intellectuals who have feared the dangers of a world that despises and puts the humanities on the back burner. This is not the place to discuss the importance of the humanities, and as long as arts ...Read more...
Francis Haskell, the art historian opposed to lending works to exhibitions
Who knows what Francis Haskell (1928 - 2000), the unforgettable English art historian who was perhaps the one who more than any other opposed the practice of box office exhibitions, so-called blockbuster exhibitions or even, much more simply, unneces...Read more...
Who was really Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Tracy Chevalier 's novel and Peter Webber's subsequent film, starring an outstanding Scarlett Johansson as the protagonist, helped bring the work into the public imagination. Last year's controversial and controversial exhibition in Bologna, curated...Read more...
The Pinacoteca differently dismembered, and the superintendent apostrophizing those who legitimately protest
Dismemberment. [smem-bra-mén-to]. "s.m. 1. Action of dismembering. 2 fig. Division, disintegration of that which constitutes an organic and natural whole." This is the definition of the term dismemberment according to Aldo Gabrielli's Grande Dizio...Read more...
In Rome, should archaeologists and art historians find another job?
In an interview with AgoraVox at the height of the election campaign, the current mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino declared that his intent was to "remake Rome as a place of culture, innovation, meritocracy and secularism." There would be so much to disc...Read more...
Carrara flood: mayor and junta take responsibility. And above all: the mindset changes.
Our readers accustomed to posts about art and culture will forgive us if we continue to talk about theCarrara flooding, but it affects us very closely and, as they can well imagine, we are really taken. In these hours the emergency is receding and we...Read more...
Sensuality and purity: the Three Graces of Canova and Thorvaldsen compared
When Antonio Canova created, at the invitation of Josephine de Beauharnais, his celebrated Three Graces, he actually succeeded in setting off a challenge, and the theme of the Graces represented an important test for many artists of the time: the fir...Read more...
Franceschini, artworks to pay taxes: some clarity
There has been a lot of discussion in recent days about Minister Dario Franceschini 's statements about the possibility of paying taxes with works of art: an outing taken by most as a proposal or an idea, but in fact an idea it is not, since there is...Read more...
The hands of unbridled privatization (and Quagliariello) on everyone's cultural heritage
It is something that has been little talked about (and, therefore, few people know about), but this Tuesday the Magna Carta Foundation, chaired by Ncd parliamentarian Gaetano Quagliariello, presented at the Rome Chamber of Commerce, in the presence ...Read more...
Minister Franceschini wants to bring artwork to schools. But schools need more
The initiative A Work of Art in the Classroom has yet to get off the ground, but it has already raised, at least on social media, numerous questions and several controversies. But let's go in order. Meanwhile, what does the project wanted by Minister...Read more...
Riace Bronzes: why it was a wise decision not to bring them to the Expo
This morning I found myself reading a precise and timely article in the Huffington Post written by Michele Dantini about the negative opinion of the MiBACT commission on the transfer of the Riace bronzes to Milan in view of the Expo. Meanwhile, the...Read more...
Art and anarchy: Paul Signac and his Au temps d'harmonie
It was June 24, 1894, when, in Lyon, Italian anarchist Sante Caserio murdered French Republic President Marie-François Sadi Carnot with a stab wound to the heart. They did not have time to pass two months that Sante Caserio, immediately captured a...Read more...
Three reasons why Cristina Acidini's resignation is not good news
The news of Cristina Acidini's resignation as Superintendent of the Polo Museale Fiorentino has created some turmoil in the environment. Let's be clear: Cristina Acidini is a very serious and respectable art historian, who during her tenure, however,...Read more...
The spectacular Convite in the House of Levi (or the Pharisee) by the Haeredes Pauli in Verona
Those who have been following our podcast on Paolo Veronese (or those who have been to the exhibition dedicated to him in Verona), will surely know that in the last section of the exhibition set up at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia, it is possible to...Read more...
21 reasons to hate museums? Three are enough to love them
There was much discussion in mid-August about an article in the Telegraph by travel journalist Oliver Smith, provocatively titled 21 Reasons Why I Hate Museums. Now, I don't know if this is how much this corresponds to Oliver Smith's actual thinkin...Read more...
Lucca deserves much more than Stefano Cecchi's screeds and Klaus Davi's ideas
The National Museums of Lucca, which are already having a rough time of it, are subjected these days to at least two crossfires: those of Stefano Cecchi, editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Nazione, and Klaus Davi, who has proposed (without anyone ha...Read more...
Stolen Guercino and newspaper sloppiness
That Guercino 's Madonna with St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory the Wonderworker was stolen, everyone knows by now: after all, art history is wont to make headlines in the mainstream media either when there is a million-euro sale at some au...Read more...
Caravaggio, Cigoli, Passignano: three artists competing for a painting. Or not?
And wanting Monsignor Massimi an Ecce Homo that would satisfy him, he commissioned one from Passignano, one from Caravaggio and one from Cigoli, without the knowledge of the other; all of which, having been finished and compared, he liked his more th...Read more...
Riace bronzes with boas and loincloths: whose responsibility is it?
We have already discussed that the Riace bronzes adorned with boas and leopard-print loincloths create more harm than good for the fight against homophobia: adorning ancient statues according to the most boorish homosexual stereotypes, in fact, does ...Read more...
Riace bronzes with boas and leopard-print thongs don't break down prejudices about homosexuals: they fuel them
July 28 was Marcel Duchamp's birthday: he was the first artist to revisit a masterpiece of the past in a desecrating way to denounce thehypocrisy of contemporary society. It was 1919, Duchamp's work was L.H.O.O.Q., his gesture scandalized the well-wi...Read more...
MiBACT seeks free workers: unworthy, offensive and dangerous
In the famous final scene of the 1988 film Fantozzi va in pensione (Fantozzi retires),Italy's most famous accountant, retired but prey to nostalgia for when he used to work and eager to resume his now old daily routine, makes a pact with the Mega-Dir...Read more...
Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur: Winckelmann and the foundations of neoclassicism
One could not understand neoclassicism without referring to the figure of the main theorist of this movement that developed in the second half of the 18th century and also distinguished much of the following century: we are talking about Johann Joach...Read more...
According to Montanari, the MiBACT reform would not be renzian. Are we really sure about this?
I make no secret of the fact that here at Windows on Art we greatly appreciate the figure of Tomaso Montanari: for his intelligence, for his stubbornness, for his meritorious work in defense of the country's cultural heritage, for the fact that he is...Read more...
MiBACT reform: far from revolutionary. Few good ideas, many doubts
To comment on the MiBACT reform presented on July 16 by Minister Dario Franceschini, I will begin with a statement by the minister himself, made on the same day the reform was presented. Said the minister the other day,"in Italy we have gold mines ev...Read more...
Carrara: art that pleases the bosses. And the mayor who stands with them, to the detriment of citizens
A few days ago I told you about the forgettable exhibition that was organized by theAcademy of Fine Arts in Carrara as part of Marble Weeks. It is worth devoting a post precisely to Marble Weeks, which is considered the most important Carrara art rev...Read more...
... and they dared to call it an exhibition. But blame must be sought elsewhere
In Carrara, the 2014 edition of Marble Weeks began a few days ago, and in yet another highly original way, there was an exhibition on the plaster casts of theAcademy of Fine Arts. The third in the last four years-I'm just amazed that last year they s...Read more...
People of museums and exhibitions? Perhaps better to speak of people of fetishes and people of art
The day before yesterday a nice article came out in Repubblica in which Antonio Natali, director of the Uffizi, wrote that the museum people and the exhibition people seem to be two different entities. On the occasion of the exhibition on Pontorm...Read more...
Art that exposes environmental havoc, but institutions don't like it (by Carrara)
Finally some real art was seen in Carrara. Although it was very short-lived and we at Windows on Art didn't get to see it in time. I'm referring to the installation Marble R.I.P., conceived and created by the two artists Robo (stage name of Rober...Read more...
Milo Moiré's performance: is it possible to talk about art?
The performance that Milo Moiré gave in Basel at the contemporary art exhibition Art Basel caused a stir: the artist showed up at the entrance to the fair completely naked, and with the names of the clothing worn on various parts of the body writt...Read more...
States General of Culture? No, of rhetoric and chatter
Let's say that for the first live tweeting of Windows on Art we were hoping for slightly more interesting topics. But the fact remains that the first live tweeting that we conducted on our Twitter profile took place this morning on the occasion o...Read more...
Florence Baptistery becomes an advertisement for a French multinational. But who paid for it?
One of the most important lessons left to us by George Brummell, the greatest dandy in history, is thatelegance consists in being inconspicuous, inconspicuous. So, it goes without saying that we certainly cannot speak of elegance for the setting ...Read more...
The Bernardino Luini affair in Milan: all of us are the losers
Were it not for the fact that the story is true, there would also be laughter. But it really happened: Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, curators of the exhibition Bernardino Luini and His Sons, running until July 13 in Milan (at the Palazzo Reale),...Read more...
Carrara: According to Caffaz, culture should be systematized. But there has been time.... !
Finally Carrara had a noteworthy artistic event. We are talking about Carrara Studi Aperti, which took place on May 31 and June 1: it was an event in which artists working in the city opened their studios and workshops to the public. We at Finestre s...Read more...
Venice raped
It wasn't enough to have the big ships passing through St. Mark's basin every day, prompting Venetians to hope and pray that nothing bad would happen. It wasn't enough the waffling and intrusive tourism that has turned Venice into an amusement park, ...Read more...
Damien Hirst's Sheep. Reflecting on the meaning of art
A huge stir has been caused by the news that Englishman Damien Hirst will exhibit one of his sheep in formaldehyde at Icastica, an exhibition to be held in Arezzo in a couple of weeks. Mind you, the operation of Hirst, who is used to putting dead ani...Read more...
Freedom to #selfie at museums: but this doesn't really help the promotion of knowledge
Last Friday, that is, the day after the meeting of the Council of Ministers in which the decree law for culture was approved, I scoured the entire Italian government website looking for the text of the decree law-a waste of time, because the text...Read more...
Goldin: it is not snobbery to say his exhibitions are not culture
On May 13, an article signed Alessandro Zangrando and titled Why we like Goldin's art appeared in Corriere del Veneto. I am glad that the journalist had a good experience participating in the exhibitions in Vicenza and Bologna, organized by the indef...Read more...
Servizio Pubblico at the Uffizi: here's what Antonio Natali would have liked to (but couldn't) say
Although almost two weeks late, I managed to take a look at Andrea Casadio 's report on the Uffizi that Servizio Pubblico, the La7 program, aired on the evening of May 1. Those who had not yet watched it should know that they can employ the eleven mi...Read more...
Managers in museums: an idiocy, according to Settis. And how can you blame him?
In English, the word manager basically corresponds to the Italian word dirigente. Indeed: it is its most immediate translation. Except that in the common meaning (or rather, in the meaning common to politics and journalism, which is then reflecte...Read more...
The commitment of those involved in art history and their duty to express their thoughts
The work never stands alone; it is always a relationship. To begin with: at least a relationship with another work of art. A work alone in the world would not even be understood as human production, but looked upon with reverence or horror, as magic,...Read more...
If the Internet is compared to a garbage dump, we are deeply offended
On Saturday, April 19, Giuseppe De Tomaso, editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (one of the most important newspapers in southern Italy), signed an editorial regarding one of the measures of the Renzi government's tax we...Read more...
Farinetti's terrifying and disturbing ideas about southern Italy
Oscar Farinetti is a guy who, without making too many mysteries, we do not particularly like. In fact, far from it. To understand the character a bit, one would only have to enter any of the Eataly stores scattered a throughout the country (and for...Read more...
Mantua: the Bridal Chamber has been waiting for two years, but there is talk of floating towers
Were it not for the fact that the project will be financed in large part by public entities, there would also be smiles. There has been talk in Mantua for some time about the project that yet another archistar (by the way: what a horrendous term) who...Read more...
Alessandro Magnasco and Fabrizio De André. Common traits in painting and music of two modern artists.
In a well-known photograph taken by Guido Harari, the great Fabrizio De André is portrayed on his bed in his home, reading a newspaper, with his guitar at his side and a whole series of books and objects (pens, pencils, notebooks, a telephone... )...Read more...
Jackson Pollock, Michelangelo and the ubiquitous dialogues in exhibitions
The word dialogue, when used outside of proper contexts, is one of the ugliest and most overused words in the Italian language. Increasingly, in the world of culture (or pseudo-culture), but especially exhibitions, the term dialogue is invoked almost...Read more...
The Stones and the People - by Tomaso Montanari
After A cosa serve Michelangelo?, released in 2011 and of which, moreover, you can find the review here on Finestre sull'Arte, Tomaso Montanari returns to bookstores with another book that helps us to better understand the history of art today: we a...Read more...
The useless superintendencies
No, we have not gone out of our minds and do not think that superintendencies are useless, on the contrary: their importance is fundamental, and former minister Massimo Bray also reminded us of this just yesterday in an article published on his websi...Read more...
All for fitness at Santa Maria della Scala... along with the paintings!
One of the best feelings after a fencing competition (since this writer has been practicing the sport for years) is to strip down, grab a nice packet of bubble bath in your hand, and jump into the shower. Because it is to be expected that in places e...Read more...
The irony of Giambattista Tiepolo.
On March 5, 1696, one of the greatest artists of the 18th century, Giambattista Tiepolo, was born in Venice: an anniversary that today is also celebrated by Google, which dedicates its doodle to the Venetian artist, creating a composition inspired b...Read more...
After a year of little (or no) results, Ilaria Borletti Buitoni is still undersecretary
Let's face it: after all, although the chances were slim, we were holding out hope that Matteo Renzi would at least give us the grace to remove Ilaria Borletti Buitoni from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Instead, not only has she been confirmed,...Read more...
Simone Caffaz's Luna Caput Mundi. Put together Michelangelo, Canova, Berlusconi and Gigi Buffon...
... and write a book about it. Well, there are those who have managed to find a logical thread that unites these characters, and also to make a literary work out of it all: the author of such an exciting work answers to the name of Simone Caffaz,...Read more...
Art history in school and the masters of journalism
Over the past few days, our Facebook walls have been almost clogged with hundreds of comments from users concerned about the fate of art history in Italian schools: all stemming, probably, from an article posted on February 5 on the website Bloggokin...Read more...
Windows on Art and Mo(n)stre together for Palazzo Del Medico in Carrara
Tomorrow, in the late afternoon, I and my friend Fabrizio Federici, an art historian of well-known skills, titles and competences, as well as admin of the beautiful Facebook page Mo(n)stre, will be received in Carrara, in the town hall, by the Co...Read more...
A tour of Verdi Square in La Spezia to understand the meaning of art at school
These days the hashtag #arteascuola is gaining popularity on Twitter: those who participate create thoughts (somewhat along the lines of what was done in elementary school) in support of teaching art in school. A practice, that of cause-related tweet...Read more...
"The Great Beauty" by Paolo Sorrentino: a possible reading itinerary between contemporary and ancient art
One of the most interesting scenes in Paolo Sorrentino's film La Grande Bellezza, which just a few days ago won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, presents itself to the viewer about a quarter of an hour after it begins. It is an artistic perfor...Read more...
Michelangelo. A restless life - by Antonio Forcellino
The history of art, even and especially when it is presented without thatmysterious halo that marketing nowadays necessarily wants to assign to it in order to make it seem more appealing, always turns out to be a subject that is as fascinating as eve...Read more...
The limitations of the Jan. 11 event: the propositional part, perhaps, needs improvement.
Ever since I read about a demonstration by cultural professionals scheduled forJan. 11, I have felt what I might describe as a mixture of skepticism and good hope: has the most fragmented and least cohesive working class in Italy finally found the st...Read more...
Esselunga's fall from grace on supermarket at Palazzo Te: vouchers given away to Mantuans
The Esselunga project in Mantua has been much talked about. The intention is to build in the Porta Cerese area, close to Palazzo Te, a supermarket of the chain that will replace the old and dilapidated sportshall1. Summing up what has been said in re...Read more...
Dear Professor Montanari, Eataly's real problem is not the trivialization of the Renaissance
As those who have been following this site for some time will have well guessed, one of my favorite reads when it comes to current events related to art-historical heritage is Tomaso Montanari's blog, which just yesterday brought out a post entitled ...Read more...
Massimo Bray is a gentleman. But the call for 500 young people is still a missed opportunity.
I watched a few days late the interview with Massimo Bray conducted by Fabio Fazio on last Sunday's episode of Che tempo che fa. I do not want to say that I would have done better to have spent these 18 minutes and 28 seconds on other activities,...Read more...
Matteo Renzi wins, culture loses
Of the ideas that Matteo Renzi, fresh winner of the PD primaries, has about culture, we spoke this summer, in an article that moreover we are circulating in these hours on social networks, and which is achieving great success (today we marked the his...Read more...
Journey into the Italy of culture in the service of politics
In Italy it has become increasingly difficult to find the right people in the right places when it comes to public bodies or at least bodies chaired by publicly appointed people. For example, someone who understands agriculture to be in charge of agr...Read more...
More on museum websites: a response to Caterina Pisu of the National Association of Small Museums
My article about Repubblica 's research on museum websites aroused the interest of some insiders (which can only make me happy), including Dr. Caterina Pisu, museologist as well as coordinator of the Research and Communication sector of the Nationa...Read more...
Republic's (bad) research on museum websites. And a proposal
A few days ago, November 23 to be exact, a kind of "survey" of museum websites came out in the pages of Repubblica. The title of the article that presented the results is a whole program:"Ugly and inhospitable, here are the Italian museums on t...Read more...
Congressman Scalfarotto, come visit Italian museums and art places with us.
In an article that appeared Saturday in IlPost1, PD MP Ivan Scalfarotto had his say about a very sensible open letter written by Salvatore Settis to the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Angelo Scola, asking him to stop work on thepanoramic elevator be...Read more...
States General of Culture in Milan: yet another pointless talk
The very low level of sympathy for this event is already evident from the name that some lofty mind thought of giving it: States-General of Culture. It is reminiscent of the assembly of the social classes in pre-revolutionary France (and we all know...Read more...
Roberto Giacobbo's high popularization of science--could you have guessed it?
"We chose not to present a particular title but to focus on high science popularization. For this we will have a meeting with Roberto Giacobbo on Saturday." Did I read that correctly? At the same time the terms "high popularization of science" and "R...Read more...
A salute to Hasan Niyazi, art history blogger
I learned only today (unfortunately late), through a post by Sergio Momesso of Art Histories, of the untimely death of Hasan Niyazi, one of the most followed art history bloggers on the net. Hasan Niyazi was the author of Three Pipe Problem(www.3pipe...Read more...
Riace bronzes at the gas pump
And yes, we had seen bad ad campaigns, and lots of them. And in this sense MiBAC has been a master. We have seen Michelangelo 's poor David taken away by helicopters. We saw the young man in Francesco Hayez 's Kiss change partners and choose a girl i...Read more...
To satisfy the whims of Berlusconi and his cronies, we (s)sell our heritage
On our Facebook page, whenever we try to draw the attention of our thousands of fans to current political events, we always receive criticism (by now it is mathematical) related to the fact that we should deal only with art and not politics. It is no...Read more...
From Canova to Beccafumi: ten works destroyed or damaged at exhibitions
The destruction of Antonio Canova's plaster cast of TheKilling of Priam, which was shattered in early August during preparations for the staging of the Canova exhibition scheduled in Assisi from Aug. 10 to Jan. 31,1 continues to spark controversy abo...Read more...
If renting a room at the Uffizi costs as much as a table at Billionaire. Reflections on the fee schedule
In the last few hours, in Il Fatto Quotidiano, art historian Tomaso Montanari has divulged some of the figures of the fee schedule for the concession of the Polo Museale Fiorentino 's spaces for events, a fee schedule that will be presented by Cristi...Read more...
Art according to Matteo Renzi: the seven "best" renzian gimmicks in five years in office
By now he has become a regular presence, not a day goes by that I don't see at least one appearance by Matteo Renzi on television or in the newspapers, so much so that when I don't hear news about him or see his jolly face on the news, I almost get w...Read more...
Italian artworks for rent
Among the novelties proposed in the "Simplification" Bill approved yesterday by the current Council of Ministers, we find a content that has already provoked the first discussions at least on social networks and that (and this is little but certain) ...Read more...
Art historians and Goldin... why criticize him?
A few evenings ago I was discussing one of the topics that are in vogue when you find yourself having an aperitif with friends who have the same passion for art history as you, namely, yet another gimmick of Marco Goldin, who has always been seen as ...Read more...
The Doria Table - by Louis Godart
Before I begin my review of the book La Tavola Doria by Louis Godart, published by Mondadori, I feel obliged to thank the author for quoting me in a passage of the book in which he discusses Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari, the events of...Read more...
Giancarlo Galan chairman of the Culture Commission: if anyone feels like commenting...
Some of our friends, readers, and Facebook fans have asked us why we have lavished words on the appointments of Massimo Bray and Ilaria Borletti Buitoni but have made no comment on the appointment of Giancarlo Galan as chairman of the House Cul...Read more...
Ilaria Borletti Buitoni's disconcerting statements on MiBAC and volunteerism
For days now, the controversy over the Night of Museums, the event to be held on Saturday, May 18, has been lingering: through a Facebook post (later removed), the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in fact had asked for the support of volunteer organizat...Read more...
Massimo Bray: an excellent start
Massimo Bray 's tenure at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities certainly got off to the best possible start. In the meantime, he has shown his closeness to the art historians who will gather in L'Aquila this Sunday, May 5, for an even...Read more...
Some thoughts on the appointment of Massimo Bray as minister of cultural heritage
In the end, the name that was chosen for the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities was that of Massimo Bray: originally from Lecce, born in 1959, the newly appointed minister studied in Florence, lives in Rome, and among his professional exper...Read more...
Why Ilaria Borletti Buitoni should NOT become minister
In these hours during which the shortlist of names that will govern (so to speak) the country in the coming times is being composed (and, of course, it will be a government from which one should not expect the slightest change, given the names circul...Read more...
Da Vinci's Demons, was there a need?
Tonight, Fox Tv will air for the first time the Italian version of Da Vinci's Demons, a series dedicated to none other than the young Leonardo da Vinci.We wanted to see the first episode in the original language before it is broadcast in Italy, partl...Read more...
Massa and the 105 fountains project
It has been talked about in Massa for a while (i.e., since last summer): we too felt the need to say something about it, but we refrained from doing so because it seemed to be one of the many "summer ideas" so common in our parts, ideas that usually ...Read more...
5-Star Movement, triggers and culture
A few days ago, on our Facebook page, we made some timid attempts to start a discussion on the relationship between the 5 Star Movement and culture. It was our intention to delve into this topic with interviews: we therefore contacted three newly ele...Read more...
Canova's plaster casts in Massa? If only!
Speaking in a broadcast ("Visitors") on a broadcaster in the province of Massa and Carrara, TT News, the vice president (as well as former director) of theAcademy of Fine Arts of Carrara Marco Baudinelli, as we read in yesterday's Tirreno newspaper o...Read more...
What is the point of FAI's Culture Primary?
Already on January 6, when FAI(Fondo Ambiente Italiano) launched its Culture Primaries, I had turned my nose up at it. I would like to point out that we very much support and appreciate all FAI activities, and moreover we have two FAI members, Riccar...Read more...
The secret in the gaze - by Valentina Casarotto
The book I am telling you about today was recommended to me by a number of people, including one of the best friends of Windows on Art, namely Grace, whose advice was instrumental... ! It is titled Il segreto nello sguardo (The Secret in the Gaze), s...Read more...
What does Antonio Canova have to do with the Velvet Underground?
What does the greatest interpreter in sculpture of neoclassicism, namely Antonio Canova, have to do with one of the most important (and probably the most influential) groups in rock history, namely the Velvet Underground? Apparently nothing: in fact,...Read more...
Youth and museums: possible ways to make the union viable
Reading through the proceedings of the 2011 Lubec conference, I happened to find some interesting food for thought on the topic of"museum and young people": although I arrive a year late, since we are referring to the 2011 Lubec, it is still a topic ...Read more...
What is Michelangelo good for? - By Tomaso Montanari
This one I am presenting today is one of those books that, once read, you will never tire of rereading and appreciating: I myself have read it three times. We are talking about A cosa serve Michelangelo? by Tomaso Montanari, a Florentine art hist ori...Read more...
The Mona Lisa: let's leave it in the Louvre!
They are back on the attack: as all the newspapers have headlined, on the strength of no less than one hundred and fifty thousand signatures collected, Silvano Vinceti and his "team" have returned in recent days to call, with renewed insistence, for ...Read more...
More on the Battle of Anghiari: the 'search finds' hoax
While looking for material to write the summary of the search for Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari, the wall painting that Maurizio Seracini and his team would like to find under Giorgio Vasari 's Battle of Marciano della Chiana in the Salone d...Read more...
Artemisia - by Alexandra Lapierre
With today's book, one could say that we almost pick up the thread from the book we told you about last time, The Forbidden Books by Mario Infelise, because the events of Alexandra Lapierre's novel Artemisia (in Mondadori's Best Sellers edition) coin...Read more...
Carrara diffuse museum: let's spread the care of our heritage first!
On June 16, on the occasion of the feast day of Carrara's patron saint, St. Ceccardo, the so-called "Museo diffuso" in the historic center was inaugurated, or, to quote the words of the article published in the Tirreno newspaper on the same June 16...Read more...
Caravaggio's drawings and Daniela's Ninja Turtles theory.
Over the years, I have developed the Ninja Turtles theory. This is the nice conclusion of Daniela, a fan of our Facebook page, about the media hype achieved by those few big names in art history. We were discussing, of course, the hundred Caravaggio ...Read more...
The Ways of Giulio Romano: the true story of a hardcore work
Today we nonchalantly frequent sites such as Youporn, Playboy and so on without taking any risks, but once upon a time, as we all know, it was not so easy to access certain content, and two artists, for attempting to disseminate erotic images, risked...Read more...
Cimabue on tour
The church of San Domenico is located in one of the most beautiful corners of Arezzo: coming down from the cathedral on Via Ricasoli, we turn right and after a few dozen meters we see a tree-lined, little-visited square open up, at the end of which w...Read more...
Forbidden Books - by Mario Infelise
Today we are inaugurating the new space of Windows on Art dedicated to books: we will briefly talk to you about some books that we have read, that we think are interesting to share with you and that, of course, we recommend! Today we start by examini...Read more...
The fable of Italy having "50 percent of the world's artistic heritage"
Not infrequently we hear the incredible fable ofItaly holding 50% of the world's cultural heritage: the last time, at the 8:30 p.m. edition of TG2 last night(Thursday, May 3, 2012) and the protagonist was TG2 anchor Luca Salerno, who at minute 20'27"...Read more...
What is the purpose of art history?
Mais ne conviendrez-vous pas que la Peinture est également inventée pour l'agrément et pour l'utilité? (But don't you agree that painting was invented for both pleasure and utility?)1 Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne Lately there is a ...Read more...
-
Hall-Wattens, in the Tyrolean mountains nature hikes and fascinating medieval towns
Redazione - 30/04/2024 -
Touring the Rognosi Mountains, in a little-known and unspoiled corner of Tuscany
Redazione - 30/04/2024 -
Austria, in the Saalfelden Leogang region nature, traditions, music and adventurous experiences
Redazione - 23/04/2024 -
The treasures of Sant'Agnese in Agone, a sumptuous baroque temple in Rome
Andrea Fusani - 21/04/2024 -
Entrepreneurs and art patrons of today's Tuscany: who they are and what they do
Federico Giannini, Ilaria Baratta - 16/04/2024 -
Portrait of a patron between Rome and the Apuan Alps: cardinal Alderano Cybo
Fabrizio Federici - 05/04/2024
Most read of the month
- Miart 2024: how much do the works cost? Our selection of 15 works, with prices
By Ilaria Baratta - published on 12/04/2024 alle 20:25:56 - 0 Commenti - Masolino's Year at the Dawn of the Renaissance. What the Empoli exhibition looks like
By Federico Giannini - published on 14/04/2024 alle 16:23:04 - 0 Commenti - In the beginning was the egg
By Noemi Capoccia - published on 31/03/2024 alle 11:51:52 - 0 Commenti - Journey through the workshops of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence
By Federico Giannini - published on 07/04/2024 alle 11:58:18 - 0 Commenti - Venice Biennale 2024, the top 10 best national pavilions in our opinion
By Redazione - published on 19/04/2024 alle 21:40:29 - 0 Commenti - Here are the images of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024
By Redazione - published on 18/04/2024 alle 00:53:34 - 0 Commenti - On the maternity sculpture in Milan: a technical committee should give technical opinions
By Federico Giannini - published on 10/04/2024 alle 21:14:55 - 0 Commenti - The treasures of Sant'Agnese in Agone, a sumptuous baroque temple in Rome
By Andrea Fusani - published on 21/04/2024 alle 18:15:11 - 0 Commenti
