Catalogue

You’ve always dreamed of being an artist and are almost convinced that you’ve got what it takes but when it comes to the point, you are too petrified to take the plunge. A little jeering voice tells you that you’re not really all that good, your CV isn’t up to it, you’re too stupid or in any case not very original, you won’t fool anyone and they’ll all see that you’re a phony. If these demons attack, get to work straight away. The only way to defeat the scourge of creative block is by trying and exposing yourself to the terrifying probability of being a flop. This guide crammed with useful advice and practical exercises by Jerry Saltz invites you to enter the darkest and most threatening depths of your psyche, to discover the resources you have deep down inside you, to give free rein to your vision and find the courage, in the name of art, to present it in public. And if it is true that everything becomes possible when you go from hesitation to action, don’t worry about doing it well, just do it. Have faith in your taste even when it’s a source of embarrassment. Make imagination your mantra. Break free of the tyranny of conventions and turn them to your own ends. Never forget that while art is a vessel into which you pour yourself, it is also and above all a strategy of survival, an activity just as urgent as eating or breathing.

An insatiable reader, Vincent van Gogh found in books a source of inspiration as well as a safe haven from storms, and devoured hundreds of them during his short life. The authors that captivated him include Dickens, Zola, Maupassant and the Goncourt brothers, whose pages he reread with passionate intensity, meditating on every line to the point of establishing a constant mental dialogue with the writer. Part of the energy and the creative drive that animate his painting drew vital sustenance precisely from this irresistible passion. In any case, painting with the brush or with words was the same thing for Van Gogh, who shared with the great family of his favourites the precise ideal of art as something for everyone and that everyone must be able to understand. Driven by the intuitive insight that Van Gogh’s life can be explored through the books he loved, Mariella Guzzoni displays great narrative flair in revealing previously unknown details concealed in the nooks and crannies of his art. From Still Life with a Bible to Woman Reading a Novel, the many works by the Dutch genius connected with books and reading are examined in a new light. In employing his letters, presented here in a new Italian translation, as the primary tool of investigation, the author paints a full picture of an artist fascinated not only by a number of recurrent themes but also and above all by the moral and intellectual stature of the writers he loved most. Translated into five languages and richly illustrated, the essay encompasses both the great masterpieces and the minor works of Van Gogh, showing how the man, his work and his books are interwoven in an indivisible whole. As the artist himself said, “Books, reality and art are one thing for me.”

Italian edition onlyThe conference “Immaginare l’Unità d’Italia. Gli Etruschi a Milano tra collezionismo e tutela” was organized by the Superintendency of Archaeological, Artistic and Environmental Heritage for the Metropolitan City of Milan, the Municipal Council of Milan (Civico Museo Archeologico), the University of Milan (Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage) and the Fondazione Luigi Rovati in connection with the exhibition Il Viaggio della Chimera. Gli Etruschi a Milano tra archeologia e collezionismo. The proceedings of the conference, the second stage of an in-depth research project on the Etruscans, address subjects regarding the history and specificity of Etruscan archaeological collecting as a phenomenon connected from the mid-19th to the early 20th century with nationalistic aspirations that saw the history of this people as the first experience of territorial unification under a common identity. The authors focus primarily on the major collectors who contributed to the development of archaeology in Italy, especially in connection with the city of Milan, interweaving the histories of the collections and of the institutions – universities, museums and institutes of research – that have taken up their physical and spiritual legacy of preservation and study. Attention then shifts to the close connection between collecting and preservation, addressing the evolution of activities and measures for the protection of antiquities all the way from the period prior to Italian unification up to the present national legislation with reference also to particular cases in the modern era.

An artist undertaking a portrait cannot but consider the pose to be given to the subject. Standing, sitting or reclining? What feelings will the expression convey? Will the arms be folded or busy performing some apotropaic rite? While a portrait unquestionably strikes us first and foremost for the quality of the painting and the sitter’s identity, every gesture, expression and posture of the body actually constitutes a key to a casket in which we can discover traces of the lifestyle of a particular historical period and legacies of cultures distant in time and space. And who could be better able than Desmond Morris to take up the challenge of recounting the history of body language in such a way as to delight the reader? Combining his two personae, the ethologist and Surrealist painter, he guides us on an extraordinary exploration of the postures that have attracted the attention of art lovers for centuries, from Roman statuary all the way to Pop Art. We thus discover why Napoleon was always portrayed hand-in-waistcoat and sovereigns often with one foot towards the viewer. And while it is true that gestures like shaking the fist are universal, sticking the tongue out can be interpreted as a manifestation of demonic nature or simple childish impertinence depending on the period involved. With brilliant insight, Morris tells us how artists have given shape in their works to the changes involving social habits and conventions over the centuries. In doing so, he encounters surprising similarities and eternal recurrences, rediscovering long-forgotten gestures and shedding new light on masterpieces regarded as more familiar.

Known by the ancient Romans as Caere, Cerveteri was one of the most important Etruscan cities. With its port of Pyrgi and a necropolis renowned for the magnificence and evocative quality of its tombs, it was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2004. A stage of the 19th-century Grand Tour mentioned in countless travellers’ accounts, it was the object of minute drawings and written descriptions by authors like George Dennis and Elizabeth Hamilton Gray as well as numerous historical and archaeologic studies in the 19th and 20th century. The names established in the academic sphere do not, however, include the priest Sabino De Nisco. Educated in Naples, probably under the guidance of the Latin scholar and philologist Enrico Cocchia, this self-proclaimed “doctor of letters” is the author of acute and precious contributions to our knowledge of Caere and Pyrgi that are not mentioned, however, despite their quality, in the post-1950s scholarly literature on Cerveteri. This volume presents two short studies on the origins of the city and the divinity of the temple of Pyrgi published in Naples by De Nisco in 1909. Clearly evident in both are the author’s first-hand archaeological knowledge of the site and absolute mastery of the literary sources combined with the solidity and authority of his reasoning, acute critical intelligence and keen sense of historical research in attributing the city’s origins to the Terramare culture rather than the Pelasgians and identifying the divinity of the temple of Pyrgi as the exquisitely Greek figure of Leukothea. This new edition seeks to set the writings of De Nisco, after a century of oblivion, in their rightful place alongside the principal works of historical and archaeologic research on Cerveteri.

Italian edition onlyThis book presents the proceedings of two international conferences on the Etruscan heritage and collecting in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century held in the splendid setting of the Palazzone di Cortona (1–2 November 2014 and 29–31 January 2016). Organized by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Municipal Council of Cortona, these events marked the culmination of the research project “The Etruscan Academy of Cortona: Collecting and the Republic of Letters in 18th-Century Europe”, supervised by Maurizio Ghelardi and directed by Ilaria Bianchi. Great scholarly importance attaches to the conferences, which addressed subjects connected with museology and collecting that have become a focus of antiquarian interest in recent years. The Etruscan world and collecting are also at the centre of the work of the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, whose Etruscan museum in Milan endeavours to play an active part in the study and valorization of the archaeological heritage, not least by developing solid relations with academic institutions inside and outside Italy. This approach could hardly fail to include Cortona and the Accademia Etrusca, with which collaboration has been established in support of research and scholarly debate. The Fondazione Luigi Rovati readily espoused the project of publishing the contributions of the scholars present at the conferences as a preliminary step towards in-depth examination of the processes whereby the collections of the major Italian and European museums were built up.

Whether alone or in company, aware or unaware of being observed, rebellious or ironic, innocent or sensual, figures seen from behind speak a language that enchants us and constitute a constant presence in the history of art. The first to turn her back on us was the Flora of Stabia in Roman times, a symbolic bridge between the profiles of ancient Egypt and the Italian painting of the 14th century, the period in which subjects seen from behind first appeared. Recurrent presences during the Renaissance but mostly in group scenes, they came to the fore in the 17th century thanks to Flemish painting. And while geishas in Japan have concealed their faces from time immemorial but left their necks exposed as a point of access to carnal intimacy, it was in the 19th century and in the West that the back of the head became a focal point and indeed a pictorial and literary leitmotif on a par with the Rückenfigur, the icon of romantic contemplation. In the 20th century, the world seen from behind offered eccentric and shattering visions and presented a new perspective on art and its viewers. Eleonora Marangoni’s figures seen from behind are chosen from the spheres of literature and photography, cinema and painting, video art and comic books over the centuries, grouped together by association or presented in iconic isolation. Elucidating their symbolic character and poetic significance, she demonstrates that the power of these images is born out of what they do not say, out of the inexhaustible outpouring of the imagination to which they give rise.

It is 1947, Han van Meegeren went on trial for high treason, accused of having sold a piece of Dutch cultural heritage to Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring during the war. He risked execution, even though the “Vermeer” in question was one he painted himself. Nobody believed him. To prove it, he was asked to make a copy right there and then. Van Meegeren’s contemptuous response was not long in coming: “In all my career, I have never painted a copy! But I will paint you a new Vermeer. I’ll paint you a masterpiece!” The psychological motivations that prompt such a brilliant hand to commit this kind of crime are incredibly varied: simple money-making speculation, anger at the artistic establishment, or to bamboozle so-called expert eyes... While copying the works of the great masters has long been a widespread custom, some have continued to practice it not just out of simple pleasure but to provoke, earning the self-satisfaction of men who measure themselves against the giants of art history. Noah Charney takes us on an adventurous expedition through history, psychology and science, revealing the dramas and intrigues that surround the most famous art forgeries: from Marcantonio Raimondi’s “non-original copies” of Dürer to the golden goblet made by master goldsmith Reinhold Vasters, which ended up at the Metropolitan as a work by Benvenuto Cellini, to Wolfgang Beltracchi, a true genius of the scam, who created an incalculable number of counterfeit masterpieces, and even starred in his own successful documentary. The public, after all, is always fascinated by these shady characters, especially when criminals often pass themselves off as heroes. With their shadowy charm, consumed by the hubris of rewriting history, forgers create perfect deceptions to prove their own brilliance. Which, in many cases, truly exists.

On coming face to face with Matisse’s scandalous Le Bonheur de vivre in 1906, Sergei Shchukin found himself shivering uncontrollably. The scion of an illustrious Muscovite family, Shchukin was a consummate collector of great experience at the age of just over fifty. After reviving the fortunes of his father’s textile business, he had spent a decade visiting Paris to gaze upon the avant-garde paintings exhibited there, the works by Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh whose glowing colours were to adorn the walls of the Trubetskoy Palace. In 1906, Shchukin recognized the wave of emotion that overwhelmed him whenever he felt that a work had to be his from the very first moment. This was the start of a close and fruitful relationship with Matisse that led to the creation of masterpieces like La Danse and La Musique, and marked the peak of Shchukin’s farsighted vision, as epitomized by his remark to the artist: “The public may be against you but the future is on your side.” A few years later, his new guest was none other than Picasso, initially greeted with all due circumspection but ultimately coming to dominate Shchukin’s already splendid body of works. The peerless collection thus built up was opened to the public on a regular basis before its confiscation by the state after the Revolution of 1917. On beholding that explosion of colours, the young Russian artists underwent a cultural shock equalled only by the passion to emulate those glowing canvases that was to inspire the works of future generations. In relating the life of the man and the patron of the arts, the authors necessarily also retrace the destinies of his four brothers, Nikolai, Piotr, Dmitri and Ivan, and the crucial part they played. Epitomizing the different aspect of patronage, they all helped with their collections to enrich the holdings of Russia’s museums. Together with them, Sergei Shchukin was the leading figure in a family saga interwoven with the stormy history of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century and with the artistic revolution that turned Europe upside-down in the same period.

An anomalous figure on the Italian and international scene and a pioneering experimenter in the fields of painting, photography and cinema, Paolo Gioli (b. 1942) creates timeless images, concentrating a vast iconography into a series of virtuoso operations with artistic and photographic techniques. His work shatters all disciplinary constraints and develops like a complex of interweaving reflections that involve numerous fields. From the painting and nude studies of the early 1960s in Venice and the discovery of the artistic avant-garde, photography and experimental cinema after a stay in the United States all the way through over half a century of prolific and magmatic activity, Gioli has always operated as a kind of media archaeologist, combining the study of images and observation of the human body in its anatomical, aesthetic, ideological and erotic aspects. While his early films establish an essential analogy between celluloid and skin as a sensitive interface between the self and the world outside, his Polaroid transfers use the body and parts of it as a way of examining the history and theoretical foundations of photography. Other cycles of works – like the self-portraits, the “unknowns” and the “dissolute” and “luminescent” figures – blaze an existential and narrative trail that crosses the boundaries into cinema in the same way as some of his film, e.g. the “stenopeic” and “contact” series, are photographic operations in terms of conception and structure. This study retraces Gioli’s activities from the beginning to the present, systematically investigating their complex ramifications in terms of media and interweaving historical and theoretical reflections with the artist’s analytical description of his working methods.

One day, between three and two and a half million years ago, an Australopithecus was wandering in the Makapan valley in South Africa when something suddenly caught his attention. It was a pebble of jasper, whose appearance, shaped by the work of natural agents, made it look like a human skull. Three cavities on a rounded surface and lo, a face appeared: in a world that until then had been limited to pure existence, this was the first “image” ever to be born. Our ability to see figures in stones or clouds presupposes an innate faculty in man: to misinterpret reality wisely in order to give it meaning. Since the Paleolithic period, this delirium of interpretation, to cite Dalí, has never ceased to have repercussions on artistic production, making those who practice it a “seer”. But if it is true that from the sputum on the walls of a hospital Piero di Cosimo could make out battle scenes, the twentieth century also produced a counter-movement: allowing a figure to degenerate into a stain, the doors of anti-clairvoyance swung open. Max Ernst’s obsession with cracks in the shapeless, living material of wood for his famous frottages, and Pierre Bonnard’s predilection for domestic scenes in which the usual contours dissolve into illegibility thus reveal themselves to be two sides of the same coin. These two trends are linked to Jean Dubuffet’s work, which with its imprints, the result of the random impression of crumbs, salt and dust on a slab, and his textures – in which even a beard ends up becoming an incongruous visual experience – have given substance to the propensity of contemporary art to disrupt our gaze on reality. Making Dubuffet his fil rouge, in his acute yet unpredictable way Adolfo Tura pursues the thousand paths of art, philosophy and literature (to name but a few) in which clairvoyance and anti-clairvoyance emerge as apparently antithetical tools that are capable of whispering answers to the same twentieth-century anxieties.

While a great deal has already been said about Giorgio Morandi the artist, it is still possible to address Morandi the man from another angle without necessarily avoiding the stages in his critical fortunes. This is precisely the approach taken by the collector Luigi Magnani, creator of the foundation that bears his name. Drawing on his long and close friendship with the Bolognese artist, Magnani places his erudition and sensitivity at the service of an elective affinity to paint an affectionate portrait. Without ever lapsing into facile hagiography or stroke-by-stroke description of the works, these memories flesh out the figure of Morandi and allow revelation to come through his own words, the very essence of the creative frenzy that manifests itself in everyday actions such as the extraordinary use of a telescope to establish the exact viewpoint of the landscape (“See the picture up there? I painted it in this room.”). The artist thus emerges “in his tastes, his moods and, no less, in his qualities”, one of which – as Stefano Roffi writes in the new foreword – is that of having always remained outside any artistic group and painted solely “for the few he felt capable of sharing in his world”. First published in 1982, Il mio Morandi bears witness to a sophisticated and self-effacing personality. It includes a series of letters by the artist that almost duplicate the narrative and make it more tangible. Rereading it today means not only retracing the course of a twenty-year relationship of mutual respect but also and above all rediscovering the most private and personal side of Morandi, the vision of an enigmatic, wizard-like and rigorous interpreter of nature, and recognizing “how much that is human found expression, through form, in his painting”.Foreward by Roberto RoffiAfterword by Daniela Ferrari