Catalogue

That of the Etruscans is a culture that has long remained mysterious and has never ceased to gain the attention of scholars of all eras. Open to the decisive Greek and oriental influences, but also projected towards the neighboring populations of central and northern Italy, it managed to make its echo reach beyond the Alps.Of this people, Sybille Haynes outlines the peculiar character and follows the historical evolution, accompanying readers among the most significant and fascinating places, finds and testimonies. Through a vast repertoire of sources it reconstructs their life and death, religion, language, architecture, art and much more: in particular the female condition is investigated with unprecedented attention. In fact, from the dedicated in-depth studies, it emerges that Etruscan women, at least those of the upper class, enjoyed substantial equality of social consideration compared to men and a freedom that was anything but usual in antiquity.A journey through images allows you to explore and closely observe the Etruscan world within an overall framework whose organization is marked by following the great stages of its history, from its origins to the Roman annexation, along all the moments of flowering, crisis and rebirth. A world which, placed at the center of the trade and influences of the Mediterranean, has been able to absorb, unify and pass on habits and customs to the origins of our culture.

Bilingual edition Ita/Eng Luigi Ontani is considered to be one of the most influential contemporary Italian artists, devoted to experimentation with many different media and tecniques: from photography to sculpture using a wide range of materials, from painting to performance art, with his celebrated tableaux vivants. The common thread of his practice is the unconventional, ironic character of his works, marked by mythopoeic echoes of Western and Eastern iconographic traditions. This publication is devoted to Ontani's site-specific intervention for the Fondazione Luigi Rovati Art Museum. Entrusted to his citationist and playful inspiration, the room with cyclamen-colored walls is decorated with a pictorial cycle of six "ibridoli etruschi" as Ontani himself calls them, for their journey towards fullness of form consists exactly in a process of multiple hybridizations: the attributes and the symbols of divinity as elements of a play of combinations that is the very life of that which is infinite, its visual pulse, the rhythm of its heart. By practicing active imagination, Ontani produces forms that appear to have been generated by an ancestral and impersonal memory, capable of drawing on the mystical level of experience in which the object of the memory consists in what is still to happen – as if their mind travelled in a sort of imminent past. Through the visionary tale of Emanuele Trevi - who together with Ontani undertook a physical and imaginative journey in the footsteps of the Etruscans - the creative process and its ingredients are retraced, the relationship with the models, the 'ars combinatoria and the polymorphic link with countless artistic traditions.

Class of '92, artist and sex worker Sophia Giovannitti tells it like it is. She proudly signs her name both in artistic performances and when meeting clients. She does not hide behind a puritanical sense of guilt: free of prejudice, she does not allow anyone to degrade her for the way she has chosen to live.Inhabiting a world where capitalism has ended up commodifying not only our free time, but also those activities that have always been considered intimate and sacred, namely art and sex, has made it possible for someone to make money from both, creating a short circuit for which, despite fully participating in the system, one is still mercilessly stigmatised. We are all bent to the market logic that controls every aspect of our lives, and yet there are those who have raised their heads, those who, from the margins, exploit this very mechanism to reclaim their space, whether in the gallery or in the bedroom, and remain uncomfortable to the hypocritical and well-considered world. Sophia then continues on her way, the best that allows her to pursue what she loves and also profit from it. In an ironic 'confessional' style, she lays bare her occupations, giving them extreme seriousness and legitimacy. Rough, brash, provocative, capable of quoting The Sopranos and Foucault in a loose and self-conscious manner, Sophia Giovannitti writes a book that is more than contemporary: a necessary reflection on the markets of art, work and sex as they were, as they are and as one dreams they will be tomorrow.

The catalog is published in Italian with English text attachedThe exhibition “Etruscan Treasures. The Castellani Collection Between History and Fashion” (25 October 2023 – 3 March 2024), hosted at the Luigi Rovati Foundation and organized in collaboration with the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, brings to Milan the most important archaeological finds and extraordinary jewels of the Castellani collection, one of the richest and best-known Roman antiquarian collections, not only for the importance of the objects that compose it, but also for the relevance of the personalities who contributed to its creation during the nineteenth century.The name of the Castellani family is linked both to the invention of a new genre of jewelery and goldsmithery "in the style of the ancients", which imitated materials of archaeological origin in appearance and techniques, and to an intense activity of collecting and trading antiquities from the Peninsula, culminating in 1926 with the transfer of the largest core of the collection to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia.The possibility of exhibiting a selection of these objects, for the first time exceptionally outside their premises, allows us to appreciate not only the great variety of materials, but also the singular quality, which had long made the Castellani studio an obligatory stop for visitors to the Eternal City.The catalog follows the exhibition itinerary by presenting the works exhibited in the following sections: “Masterpieces”, “Mediterranean Productions”, “Women’s Life”, “Jewellery”, “Gods and Heroes” and “The Castellani Family”. With texts by Maria Paola Guidobaldi, Antonella Magagnini, Daniel Neumann, Valentino Nizzo, Giulio Paolucci, Giuseppe Sassatelli, Annalisa Zanni, the catalog is enriched by important contributions that add several new features to what was already known about the historical importance of the Castellani collection and on its characteristics, with particular attention to its intertwining of ancient and modern.

Architect, designer and photographer, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) left a profound mark on the international design scene with his unmistakable visual vocabulary, made up of unprecedented combinations of materials and unprejudiced research into colour.After his prolific association with Olivetti, he became an avant-garde icon in the 1980s with the Memphis Group, before devoting himself entirely to architecture. His indispensable freedom, in work as in life, is accompanied by an insatiable curiosity that leads him to explore places and cultures, instilling the same enthusiasm in all his collaborators. A rich introduction by Emmanuel Berard and a self-portrait written and drawn by Sottsass himself, together with photographs and projects, restore the fascinating and restless creative path of a great master of Italian design, still a reference point for new generations.

Architect, designer and emblematic figure of modernity, Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) devoted her life to the art of living. After a long association with Le Corbusier, she developed a uniqueness of vision with which she succeeded in imposing herself in an all-male world. A passionate militant and audacious designer, she worked to make the iconic objects accessible to all, whose criteria of utility, functionality and beauty revolutionised the history of 20th century design by combining the use of natural materials and industrial production.Through a rich selection of images, a text by Anne Bony and an afterword by Kengo Kuma, the book traces the extraordinary parable of a free and independent woman, whose example is more relevant than ever.

Starting with the emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, the machine and the star, this volume presents three mini-essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittencies. Beginning with the works of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Alighiero Boetti, Michele Dantini sheds new light on the metaphor of the artist as ‘machine’, on the disappearance of the creative process as an orderly professional routine that had traditionally characterised the transposition of the ‘idea’ into image. A turning point that is in some ways liberating, but also harbinger of alarming implications, experienced in all their urgency by the ‘informal’ generation: how to protect oneself from the discontinuity of ‘inspiration’, how to confer duration to inner time, if everything is resolved in the unrepeatable exceptionality of the moment? Dantini analyses step by step the 'reinvention' of the artist's craft: the curious adoption of readymades to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques, the indefinite dilation of execution times; the practice of the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines thanks to 'automatic', impersonal and even delegable procedures. It is up to the 'miserable spectator' and his acuity to grasp in the works a continuity in transition, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and 'interpret a routine suddenly revealed to be devoid of recognisable techniques and references'.

In 1914, shortly before leaving for New York, Marcel Duchamp made a disruptive gesture: elevating a bottle rack to the status of a work of art through the mere selection of that object and its subsequent transfer to the ‘sacred perimeter’ of his studio. This action inaugurates the practice of readymades, industrial, everyday products to which the artist arbitrarily assigns the status of works of art, openly and ironically challenging the idea of the artist faber.The Scolabottiglie thus becomes a historical precedent that allows Ermanno Migliorini to carry out, on the one hand, an acute and far-sighted analysis of international art in the second half of the 20th century, identifying the challenges posed by the neo-avant-gardes indebted to Duchamp's iconoclastic attitude; on the other hand, he illuminates the problems that the drifts of this gesture cause to the ‘aesthetic edifice’ and to art critics unprepared to deal with it. In this fundamental essay from 1970, an attempt is made to clarify, through the lens of analytical philosophy, the general significance of Duchamp's operation and the statements that accompany it insofar as they highlight the dissociation between the artistic procedure and traditional evaluative structures. The claim to ‘propose value without bringing reasons’ has contributed to profoundly marking the direction in which much of the art of our time is moving. A direction that in the background finds, if not exactly the Scolabottiglie or another readymade, something that looks very much like it, namely something linked to the plane of unmotivated and unmovable sensitive experiences.

Born in the late 1960s, virtual reality is today at the centre of renewed interest thanks to the spread of portable and inexpensive visors that have made it a leading medium in the fields of entertainment, culture, architecture and urban planning, and medicine, but also a tool available to artists.So much so that in recent years the opportunities for the production and exhibition of artistic experiences in VR have multiplied exponentially, together with the awareness of the entire art system around this type of work.In a clear and accessible language, Elisabetta Modena's essay takes stock of the historical stages of the use of this technology in the artistic sphere and the theoretical issues connected to it, starting with the need for a new critical vocabulary and new grammar of design, exhibition and conservation.

Augmented reality populates the everyday context with digital and interactive objects, allowing concrete transformations on the environment by means of an intelligent and responsive image. From a mere object of contemplation, the image thus becomes a body, synthetic yet sensitive, capable of involving, sometimes of enchanting and frightening, the interlocutor. It is on this type of entity, ghostly yet real, that Sofia Pirandello's essay focuses, analysing the possibilities that this technology opens up for artistic practice.Beyond the easy observation that every invention entails astonishing achievements and great sacrifices, it is nevertheless impossible to ignore the criticalities that augmented reality brings with it, starting with the acquisition of an enormous amount of data on users, their preferences and movements, which opens up a whole series of questions in terms of social justice, privacy and security due to the use of this technology, even in the artistic sphere.

Bilingual edition Ita/EngMarianna Kennedy has been working for over twenty-five years in her London home-studio creating a limited number of artistic design pieces, each the result of months of collaboration with Britain's finest craftsmen. In her creative practice, the use of traditional techniques has always coexisted with a highly contemporary aesthetic vision. Known and appreciated internationally, her work has become part of prestigious private collections.This publication is dedicated to the site-specific work created for the Luigi Rovati Foundation Art Museum, and is part of a new series of monographs on important contemporary artists who have collaborated with the Foundation.As Above So Below is a mirror consisting of thirty-eight individual pieces with a distinctive pinkish hue, mounted within a rich, floral decorated frame of carved wood. Representing the cycle of nature, the bottom part of the mirror reproduces the material world, with rocks and caves, while the plant elements that furrow its surface symbolize the ascent to the spiritual world, to light, to infinity.Interviewed by Ben Weaver, Kennedy traces the history of the commission of the large mirror, from the original inspiration to its evolution, listing all the craftsmen involved. The publication is enriched by an essay by Dan Cruickshank on the history of British carving in 18th-century architecture and decorative arts, the differences with Continental carving, and the legacy of that practice, which is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Kennedy.

Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous rooms. None of them refused the invitation and the truth that emerged still holds today. Far from torturing artists, the Louvre casts a spell on them that does not fade over time. Neither discouraged nor uplifted but if anything beguiled by the abyss separating them from the giants that live there, artists alone are capable of addressing them and entering into a dialogue between equals. Schneider records their every comment and gesture, even their silences and alternating moods, outlining the direction of their thinking in a few lines. Then, at just the right moment, comes the insidious question. The answers, sometimes scathing and sometimes admiring but never deferential, reveal uncommon acumen and great intimacy also with artists of a very different nature. We thus find Chagall unforeseeably moved by Courbet (“a great poet”) and irritated with Ingres (“too polished”), Giacometti enamoured of the Tintoretto self-portrait (“the most magnificent head in the Louvre”), and Miró onomatopoeically entranced, whistling with admiration at African mosaics. The eye of each glides over the works to plumb their material depths, comment on their “chemistry” and finally decide how they have stood up over time. These fascinating walks are informed by a spirit of reconciliation between old and new that explodes any notion of the museum as a warehouse of obsolete objects with nothing to say to contemporaries. The Louvre appears to its eleven extraordinary guests as a book from which you learn to read, a gymnasium to build up your strength, a school to hone your vision, the ideal cemetery, a time machine that eliminates millennial gaps, a bridge between past and present and above all the place where it is possible to address the greatest things created since the beginning of time.