pdf - Fondazione Internazionale Menarini

n° 368 - January 2015
© Tutti i diritti sono riservati Fondazione Internazionale Menarini - è vietata la riproduzione anche parziale dei testi e delle fotografie
Direttore Responsabile Lorenzo Gualtieri - Redazione, corrispondenza: «Minuti» Edificio L - Strada 6 - Centro Direzionale Milanofiori
I-20089 Rozzano (Milan, Italy) www.fondazione-menarini.it
NOTEBOOK
Rome Celebrates
Emperor Augustus
introduced by Augustus to
calculation of the months:
to the previous method of reporting only the feasts of the
gods he added the new festivals in honour of the prince
and of the Augustan domus.
The form and levels of this
change are the reflection and
the result of a new way of understanding, conceiving and
experiencing the chronological topography of the city, illustrated in works from the
museum’s collections and from
other Italian and foreign institutes.
Nocturnes
in Vicenza
Augustus as Pontifex Maximus
From 16 December to 2 June
2015, under the umbrella of
commemoration of the bimillenium of the death of Rome’s
first emperor, the Museo
Nazionale Romano in Palazzo
Massimo presents Rivoluzione
Augusto. L’Imperatore che riscrisse
il tempo e la città. The museum,
which holds works of prime
importance centring on Augustus – beginning with the
statue representing him as
Pontifex Maximus – is also
home to the surviving fragments of the Fasti Praenestini.
This marble calendar is an occasion to explore calendars
and, specifically, the reforms
The Tutankhamon – Caravaggio – Van Gogh. La sera e i notturni dagli Egizi al Novecento
exhibition, presented through
2 June at the Basilica Palladiana of Vicenza, focuses above
all on painting from the 1400s
through the 1900s, showcasing selected works which interpret night, the stars and
moonlight as profound correlations of the human soul.
It begins with 19th-century
Naturalism – from Turner and
Friedrich through the Impres-
sionists – and goes on to Mondrian and Klee at the start of
the next century. Night is not
only a setting for sacred stories, as in Giorgione and Titian or in Caravaggio and El
Greco; it is also a highlycharged spiritual, inner-looking moment, as in certain abstract painters, from Rothko
to De Staël. The six sections
of the exhibition trace a path
starting on the Nile, where
night was associated with the
otherworld; the subjects of
the paintings by the 16thcentury masters, especially
the scenes from the life of
Christ, are set in evocative
nocturnal ambiences. Another
space hosts etchings: here,
Rembrandt comes up against
Piranesi, the former with his
celebrated religious subjects,
the second with his equally
famous Prisons. As curator
Marco Goldin notes, the show
would ‘testify to the sense
of a night which is no longer
only the result of a physical
and representative vision, but
an interior experience, determined by our inner depths,
our psychology, dreams and
memory’.
Painting Food:
an Exhibition
in Brescia
Il cibo nell’arte. Capolavori dei
grandi maestri dal Seicento a
Warhol, at Palazzo Martinengo
of Brescia from 24 January to
14 June. A ‘banquet’ for the
public, an opportunity to discover how food has been depicted by artists in various historical periods. With more
than 100 works by masters of
the past such as Campi, Baschenis, Ceruti, Figino and Recco,
and modern and contemporary artists from Magritte to
de Chirico, from Fontana to
Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol,
the exhibition ranges over a
time span of more than four
centuries. Ten theme sections
examine the various iconographies adopted by the artists,
with flair and brilliance, for
their representations of food.
From ‘Allegories of the Five
Senses’, different types of food
and ‘Markets, Larders and
Kitchens’, the show goes on
to sumptuously-laid tables,
‘painting’ a panorama of dining customs through the centuries. The ‘Food in 20th Century Art’ section concludes
the exhibition. The initiative
embraces a series of learning
laboratories and theme itineraries for the schools, designed
to aid exploration of the most
significant aspects and themes
of the works on show.
Russian Icons
in Florence
Paul Gauguin: Tahitian Woman
Until 1 February, Florence’s
Sala delle Reali Poste is the
exhibition venue for the
Collezione delle icone russe agli
Uffizi: on show, 81 icons owned
by the Florentine galleries,
the oldest collection of Russian sacred images outside of
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the Orthodox world. The two
very oldest, a Marian icon and
another of the Decollation of the
Baptist, date to the late 14th
– early 15th century. Highly
regarded by the Medici, in the
late 1500s they figured among
the furnishings of the Palazzo
Pitti chapel. The nucleus of
the collection, made up mostly
of icons dating to the first half
of the 18th century, came to
Florence when the Lorraines
ruled: an inscription on the
back of the icon depicting the
Stories of Christ suggests ties
with the Orthodox Church of
the Santissima Trinità of
Livorno, built in the 18th century during the reign of Francis Stephen. The exhibition is
arranged in three sections: the
panels depicting Christ, the
Mother of God and the saints
most venerated by the Orthodox Church.
Giacomo Ceruti called Pitocchetto, Two Boys Tapping Wine
Modernity
According to Boldini
The Musei San Domenico of
Forlì are paying tribute, from
1 February to 14 June, to one
of the most highly-regarded
and prolific of the Paris-based
Italian artists of the late-19th
and early-20th centuries, with
the exhibition Boldini. Lo spettacolo della modernità. In his
long career, this painter from
Ferrara enjoyed extraordinary
good fortune – despite arousing what were often heated
disagreements among critics
and the public. Loved and debated even early on by friends
and colleagues such as Telemaco
Signorini and Diego Martelli,
during the years of his greatest success he was appreciated
and adopted by Paris’ most
sophisticated circle, that of the
Goncourt brothers and Proust.
The Forlì exhibition offers an
articulated, in-depth vision of
Boldini’s multiform creative
activity to valorise not only
his paintings but also his extraordinary graphic produc-
sophisticated,
elegant
Modigliani et ses amis exhibition recounts one of the most
famous artists of the 20th century, tracing Amedeo
Modigliani’s career in art, from
his training with painter
Guglielmo Micheli in Livorno
through his Parisian period:
from 1906 until his death in
1920, Modigliani lived and
worked in the French capital,
where he frequented the haunts
of artists and men of letters.
The exhibition itinerary highlights Modigliani’s relationship with his artistic milieu
and his defence of his individuality – and immerses the visitor in a world, that of Montmartre and Montparnasse,
which still exerts an unequalled
fascination. Modigliani and
the Pisan exhibition are extensively discussed in an article published online at the
Fondazione Internazionale
Menarini website (www.fondazionemenarini. it).
At Mart, the Centenary
of the Great War
Giorgio de Chirico: Composition of Fruit with Classical Statue
tion: drawings, watercolours,
etchings. The show also proposes an interesting look at
Boldrini’s early work in the
years from 1864 to 1870, which
he spent mainly in Florence in
close contact with the Macchiaioli. This phase, with its
small paintings (mostly portraits) of superlative quality
and originality, is shown in
the new light shed by a portion of the cycle of vast murals of Tuscan landscapes and
scenes of rural life painted between 1866 and 1868 at Villa
Falconiera in Collegigliato,
near Pistoia, the residence of
the English Falconer family.
Together, the small and large
works compose a more complete picture of ‘Boldrini Macchaiolo’. Then his first works
after moving permanently to
Paris: landscapes and smallformat paintings of genre scenes.
Finally, a comparison of scenes
of modern life in exteriors and
interiors in the works of other
Italians active in Paris – De
Nittis, Corcos, De Tivoli and
Zandomenenghi – reveals Boldini as one of the foremost interpreters of the French metropolis in the Belle Époque.
Amedeo Modigliani
and His Friends
At the Fondazione Palazzo Blu
of Pisa, until 15 February, the
The exhibition entitled La
guerra che verrà non è la prima.
Grande guerra 1914-2014 is
the mainstay of a major project, extending to the
Trento/Rovereto museum’s
three sites and supported by a
full program of collateral events,
meetings, conferences and other
appointments. 2014 marks
the centenary of the start of
World War I, the point of departure for a broader enquiry
into war in the 20th century
and in our day. From Bertolt
Brecht’s famous poem ‘The
war which is coming / Is not
the first one. There were / Other
wars before it. / When the last
one came to an end / There
were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered / The
common people starved.
Among the conquerors / The
common people starved too’,
the narration takes the form
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Mario Sironi: Cityscape with Truck
Giacomo Balla: The War
of a journey through the wars
of a century and recent news
to demonstrate how all wars
are the same and how yet each
is different. Avant-garde masterpieces conduct a dialogue
with propaganda, documents,
reportages, testimonials. Installations, drawings, etchings, photographs, paintings,
posters, postcards, letters and
diaries stand alongside more
recent artistic endeavours: cinematographic narrations, original documents, videos, films.
The show presents works by
the Futurists – Giacomo Balla,
Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini – and by artists who ex-
perienced the drama of WWI
firsthand, such as Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Arturo
Martini, Mario Sironi. War is
also recounted as a recurring
theme in the research of many
contemporary artists, including Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri,
Alighiero Boetti. Many WWI
relics are also on show.
Sironi, a Master
of the ‘Novecento’
Rome’s Complesso del Vittoriano is presenting a sweeping retrospective dedicated
to a master of the 20th century, Mario Sironi. 1885- 1961,
open until 8 February. Sironi’s
most significant works reconstruct his career in all its
complexity, from his Symbolist beginnings to his flirt
with Divisionism, from his
Futurist period to Metaphysical Painting, from the Novecento Italiano to mural paintings and to the works of the
post-WWII period. Sironi
was one of the most original Italian painters and one
of the most representative of
his times. In ninety paintings, from his early works to
those of his last days, plus
sketches, magazines and an
important collection of his
correspondence with the cultural world of the Novecento
Italiano, the exhibition in-
troduces an artist of European
stature. At the centre of the
Roman show are the studies
for his huge murals, such as
Il lavoratore (The Labourer,
1936) and L’Impero (The Empire, 1936), because, as curator Elena Pontiggia explains,
‘The ideal of “Grand Decoration” cultivated by Sironi
in the Thirties had taken form
in his thought much earlier
(and well before the Fascist
era), as he gazed on the Arch
of Titus and the Coliseum,
the Basilica of Maxentius and
Trajan’s Column, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla and Raphael’s and
Michelangelo’s frescoes.’