Catalogue

One of the leading artists of the twentieth century, Alberto Giacometti’s works now fetch a premium at international auctions. His oeuvre addresses multiple themes and spans almost all forms of visual art (drawing, painting and sculpture). In this variegated panorama Marco Belpoliti focuses on a common, very powerful theme in the artist’s work: space. From the circumscribed space inside rooms to that surrounding the artist’s sculptures, especially the large scale creations designed for public areas, Belpoliti is our guide to writings and artworks, declarations and interpretations, family relationships and friendships, exploring not only physical space but also the great artist’s emotional space.

After the book Camera straniera, devoted to Giacometti, Marco Belpoliti sets out to explore the life and works of another great artist, Francisco Goya. Analysing a series of drawings, portraits and self portraits, the author retraces Goya’s life and artistic career and unveils clues about his “secret”: the progressive hearing loss that began in the artist’s 30s and ended up completely cutting him off from the outside world around 1792, halfway through his life. This disability greatly influenced his art, and the fantasy elements and chimera that inhabit his works are an eloquent expression of the anguish and despair of his isolation.

Available in a new edition that has been updated and integrated on the basis of the reformed criminal provisions to protect Cultural Heritage that came into force in March 2022. Tied to memory, archives have always spoken to the need to collect and safeguard evidence of the past. An artist’s archives are critically important both to preserving material evidence of participation in certain cultural circles and to determining, defending and certifying the authenticity of works while ensuring they can be accessed and shared. But what exactly is an artist’s archive and how is it structured? What legal measures and customs apply? How are successions organised, and what goes into drawing up an annotated catalogue? What skills and features make archives key reference tools for scholars and the marketplace?This volume – created by AitArt (the Italian Association of Artists’ Archivists) for its course for curators of artists’ archives – addresses various perspectives and areas of specialisation, from humanistic-historical topics to economic-legal issues, as well as more practical considerations of filing and digitalisation. In seeking both to illustrate underlying principles and propose operating procedures, it outlines a full-fledged professional code of conduct, an invaluable guide for anyone needing to develop specific professional skills or in charge of overseeing the complex, invaluable ecosystem that is an artist’s archive.

Bilingual edition Ita/EngFrancesco Simeti is the creator of a visual universe that through a mix of naturalistic and surrealistic elements – ranging from the botanical to those inspired by medieval miniatures – analyzes the development of natural history, showing its relationship to human social history. This publication is devoted to Simeti’s site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation. Composed of two tapestries (Alla corte della civetta and Elleboro) and a series of decorative ceramic elements (Phantázō), Simeti’s work operates on multiple levels between history and fiction, reinventing the antique in personal ways and forms. Inspired by medieval bestiaries, the tapestries feature a tangled mass of hybrid and metamorphic creatures – owls, salamanders, sea monsters, unicorns, felines, rhinoceroses – through which unrecognizable human figures wearing gas masks, helmets, and respirators seek to make their way: the image represents the traumatic relationship between humans and the natural world. In conversation with Luigi Fassi, Simeti describes the elements that triggered the creative process: the boiseries and stuccoes of the palazzo (home to the Art Museum), located in a series of rooms that had remained unoccupied for years; photodocumentation of some dispersed 18th-century tapestries on the theme of chinoiserie; and a collection of precious Etruscan buccheri in black ceramic. A combination of centuries and styles, revisited and renewed, in which ancient, modern and contemporary interact mimetically.

Bilingual edition Ita/EngGiulio Paolini’s production is a metaphysical reflection on the artistic creative process. In fact, Paolini believes that the work already exists in some way, before the  intervention of the artist, who is simply the first to contemplate it. This publication is devoted to Paolini’s site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation.  Entitled Era finora, Paolini’s work is composed of two plaster heads in profile, one female and the other male. They evoke, respectively, the classical and neoclassical: the origin of the Western canon of art and of its revival at the dawn of the contemporary era. Framed by a display case, the faces seem to measure the perimeter of a space or to mark a path, like milestones. Their gaze traces a perspective accented by superimposed photographic reproductions: a kind of “portrait gallery”, a continuum of images that mark the history of man and art. The images move between past and present, as testimonies of times and spaces that are distant yet present in the here and now of viewing the work. Art history is an automatic reference for Paolini, for whom there is no difference between antique and contemporary art. All art is equal, being the investigation of the world through vision as a mental act. The time of art is that of the work, not of its creator: when the life of the artists, be they Etruscan, Greek or of the Renaissance, is over, the indefinite present of the work remains.

Ever since the Middle Ages, the Arezzo area has attracted the attention of collectors and scholars of antiquities, due to the thin and lustrous fictile vessels that were frequently unearthed there in considerable quantity. These vessels with a coral-red coating, often decorated in relief with plant motifs and figured scenes, aroused curiosity and admiration, to the extent that Giorgio Vasari praised their “most delicate carvings” and Grand Tour travellers mentioned them frequently in their diaries. In the wake of this interest, in 1841 Marco Antonio Fabroni, an Arezzo scholar of local antiquities and director of the city’s museum, published Storia degli antichi vasi fittili aretini. This was the first monograph on this significant class of pottery tableware, now known in the field of archaeological studies as terra sigillata, of which Arezzo was an important production centre.  Accompanied by nine plates reproducing 189 finely detailed, quality drawings made by the artist and sculptor Ranieri Bartolini, the volume was intended to provide an overview of what was then known about these vessels. The analytical and pragmatic approach is what makes it worth republishing today.

Isola Bisentina is one of the two islands of Lake Bolsena, the largest by surface area, located opposite the town of Capodimonte. Mentioned by Dante in the Divine Comedy, it lies close to the western shore, a few kilometres from the promontory where the ancient Etruscan-Roman city of Bisenzio, from which it takes its name, once stood. Thanks to a favourable microclimate, it preserves lush vegetation with numerous valuable tree species, including some centuries-old trees.Traces of pile-dwelling settlements off the island indicate that the area was inhabited as early as the Archaic period, and the continued presence of man is evidenced in Etruscan and Roman times by finds dating from the 6th century B.C. onwards. Later, the island offered refuge to the inhabitants of the coastal towns destroyed by the Longobards and Saracens. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the island was still documented as a prison for heretics, until it became the property of the powerful Farnese family, who had the church of Saints James and Christopher built there, with a dome designed by a pupil of Vignola, to create the family tomb. This was the period when several pontiffs were among the visitors, so that Bisentina earned the nickname 'island of the popes'.The seven chapels located on its banks, as well as the convent, were built by the Friars Minor: that of St Catherine is attributed to Antonio Sangallo the Younger, one of the most prominent architects of his time, while the frescoes in the chapel of Mount Calvary belong to the school of Benozzo Gozzoli.

Italian edition onlyThe chandelier held by the Museo dell’Academia Etrusca in Cortona isone of the most renowned  Etruscan masterpieces.  Considered one of the finest examples of ancient bronze-work, itweighs more than a half a ton. The only Etruscan chandelier to have been found intact, it entered the collections of the museum after being discovered by chance and following complex negotiations for its acquisition. Today experts seem to agree that the monumental  lamp with 16 lips was made in a workshop located in the hinterland of central-southern Etruria, between Arezzo and Orvieto. An area that in the 4th century BCE was well equipped for a production of this kind, as indicated by the other large bronzes known to have originated there. The complex iconography, the remarkable quality of the casting technique, and the precious material, enable us to exclude the possibility of such a valuable artefact’s being installed in a private property. The most plausible hypothesis is that it was destined for a public sanctuary, where it would have been able to perform its function  uninterruptedly to great effect.The volume includes essays on the theme of lighting in the Etruscan world, antiquarian history, and the creation and analysis of the decorative apparatus of the chandelier. These are complemented by a selection of letters and documents taken from Nuove letture del lampadario etrusco (1988) and a new introductory essay by Paolo Bruschetti and Giulio Paolucci, written especially for the exhibition at the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum.

For decades, the issue of cultural property illegally removed from its original context has fuelled global debate, which has heated up since public opinion turned the spotlight on prestigious Western collections holding treasures from countries that now claim ownership. Alexander Herman gives us a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the most controversial cases, such as the ongoing dispute over the Parthenon marbles or the partial repatriation of the Benin bronzes, not to mention the objects stolen from the Summer Palace in Beijing and paintings requisitioned by the Nazis. Restitution is more complex than it seems, not only because it forces us to come to terms with the abuses perpetrated by our forebears, but also because applying a contemporary idea of justice to instances of the past can have an unforeseen cost. It is now deemed unacceptable for symbols of a religious cult wrested from indigenous communities to be on display in the museums of the “predators”. But in many cases these are artifacts that have been part of their collections for centuries; indeed, some of them have acquired an enormous cultural, and even financial value for the institutions that house them, and they may be unwilling to give them up. While deliberating on how restitutions can be negotiated, this volume also questions the paradigm shift we have entered into: our obsession with rectifying past injustices could have an irreversible impact on the cultural sector for years to come.

Sometimes an image that a writer can’t get out of his head is enough to get a story moving. By contrast, even the slightest difficulty in thinking up characters and situations can block the narrative machine. It is then that this book, devised by a male and female writer for other male and female writers, comes to the rescue of those who wish to develop their imagination by seeking inspiration in images produced by others. Artworks and, if we extend our vision to the entire field of visual art, architecture, design, film frames and advertising, are not objects to be contemplated passively. These are  images that speak to us, involve us, to which we react with all our senses and our mind. They help to expand the sensory experience that is the essential baggage of every writer who, unlike the art critic, has the advantage of being able to draw on it in the most daring and spontaneous manner, not to decipher or comment on the images but to extract what they have to contribute to the cause of writing. Backed by their long teaching experience, Giulio Mozzi and Valentina Durante welcome us into their bottega della narrazione (storytelling workshop) and help us to discover how visual imagery can become an extremely useful tool for intuitively understanding aspects of storytelling, such as the figure of the narrator, dialogue, plot, style and sequence. After all, works of art are made by people who have shown a certain talent for getting to grips with and solving creative dilemmas much like those that plague people with writer’s block. So learning from their trained gazes is the best starting point for constructing more vivid and compelling scenes and plots, capable of captivating the reader’s inner eye.

In an article of 1999 Nathalie Heinich proposes considering contemporary art as a “genre” with specific characteristics, and as distinct from modern as well as classical art. When she returned to this issue 15 years later, the heated debate on contemporary art had still not burned itself out; on the contrary, the flames had been fanned by the explosion of prices and the sensationalization of the art displayed in the most revered institutions. Rather than a genre, the author ventures, contemporary art has now introduced a new paradigm. According to the meaning attributed to the term by epistemologist Thomas Kuhn, the imposition of a new paradigm engenders a violent break with the past and the redefinition of the norms governing a human activity. In the field of artistic practices this has upset the system of values that determine what can legitimately be considered art. Beauty andspiritual expression – required by previous paradigms – are no longer the order of the day and have given way to the tendency to overstep limits, always moving the horizon of the possible a little farther away. A “regime of uniqueness” is now in force, which, on principle, privileges anything that is innovative. Heinich traces the stages of this revolution, starting with the prize awarded to Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale and the fierce reactions it caused. She describes the effects of this on the mechanisms of the art world, showing how it has changed the criteria governing the production and circulation of works, the status of the artist and the role of intermediaries and institutions. Hers is an outsider’s viewpoint: as a sociologist she conducts a rigorous and impartial investigation, filled with anecdotes that become valuable analytical tools. The aim is not to supply ammunition to the prosecution or defence in the trial of contemporary art, but to state the facts. Only by registering the paradigm shift is it possible to get the obsolete categories out of the way and to approach  contemporary art with the desire to understand, rather than approve or deprecate it.

Copying works of art is a critical exercise that helps to train the eye and to make thoughts concrete. As an art critic and historian, Elio Grazioli argues for this in the most effective way: by putting it into practice. In fact, this “album” gathers together over 50 drawings by him, swift sketches executed with improvised materials during lockdown, using an unusual technique: superimposition. Two, or sometimes three, works of art, reproduced one on top of the other, form a new image, a canvas for the endless play of cross-references, where the protagonists are artists who are similar or very different, even to the point of clashing. The intuitive graphic intertwinings trigger new possibilities of interpreting iconic modern and contemporary artworks and artists. So Munch’s silent Scream suddenly seems as threatening and unsettling as a precariously balanced Richard Serra sculpture, and the gaze of one of Gauguin’s Polynesian female nudes evokes the ambiguous mix of magic, eroticism and death in the self-portrait of Nan Goldin with a black eye. We are even witness to a virtual head-to-head between Warhol and Matisse regarding the concept of repetition. While the reader’s eye and memory are hard put to recognize the original pieces, the author composes an alternative art history made of unimagined alchemies and short circuits, capable of revealing another dimension of vision and unexpected meanings.