Catalogue

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.

Giorgio Soavi goes hunting for art with an eager, avid gaze. As a viewer with an insatiable appetite he devours paintings, drawings and sculptures as if they were gourmet dishes, savouring every single ingredient. And if he often pairs eye and palate, it’s because he sees art and its products like an animal sees and devours the food it needs to survive. A writer but also  collector, in these brief accounts published for the first time in 1986 Soavi tells us about the life, works, habits and ways of the artists he adores and has frequented.Names like Giacometti, de Chirico and Balthus, whom he surprises in their intimate environment, capturing live the transition from life to art and vice versa. He does not do this as a Sunday journalist, and even less by employing the sibylline jargon of the art critic, but as a connoisseur of the subject he is writing about, because he has chewed it over for a long time, without ever satiating his appetite. The novelist’s inventiveness and dexterity come into play when he describes, for example, the feeling of langour and obscenity transmitted by Horst Janssen’s flowers captured just as they begin to wilt. He has the same kind of empathic relationship with the meticulous still lifes by Gianfranco Ferroni, the seascapes and landscapes by Piero Guccione, the flower herbariums by Jean-Pierre Velly, his beloved drawings and watercolours by Folon, Tullio Pericoli and Saul Steinberg, and Domenico Gnoli’s canvases. It seems that the only way for Soavi to write about pictures and artists is to treat them like tempting details of a story, composing pages redolent with aromas and flavours, filled with the genuineness of conversations with friends. With a foreword by Andrea Pinotti

Following the logic of arriving at a definition through pairs of opposites (light/heavy, playful/serious), in this book Massimo Minini analyses and compares two artists who have come to symbolise German art at the turn of the millennium: Anselm Kiefer and Hans-Peter Feldmann. On one side we have Kiefer, the impeccable heir of an art firmly rooted in Expressionism, manifesting sentiments and moods that, under the influence of Jung and Freud, Wagner and Goethe, Hans Baldung and Lukas Cranach, are necessarily profound, weighty and solemn. Kiefer arouses dormant spectres and opts for grandeur in his formats, materials and subject matter (barbed wire, cheval de frise, and sweeping, matter-heavy vistas of ploughed fields). In his world everything is about heaviness, gravity and will. On the other side there is Feldmann, who takes a somewhat lighter view: art is of course a serious matter, but there is no need to overdo it. This curious, ironic and at times bizarre German gentleman was one of the early conceptual artists, but lacked the solemnity of his colleagues, so much so that few took him seriously at the time. So few, indeed, that by the early 1980s his lack of success led to him leaving art altogether, and devoting himself to other things for around a decade. It was Kaspar Konig’s offer of an exhibition in Frankfurt that set his career in motion once more, leading to his present day success and acclaim. The encounter/clash between these two emblems of opposite rationales offers a complex image of a nation’s visual culture.

Artist, photographer and writer, Claude Cahun lived in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Her artistic and political works revolve mainly around the issues of homosexuality and her Jewish origins in a highly anti-Semitic society. This book is the first to examine the iconoclastic urges of Claude Cahun, the compulsion to subvert and destroy the cultural and social references that underpin all of her literary and photographic works. The author starts by looking at the artist’s Jewish, intellectual upper class roots and how she turned her back on her family to develop her artistic identity. We then see how she sets about constructing this new identity, which revolved around her homosexual relationship with Suzanne Malherbe (a.k.a. Marcel Moore), focusing on the portraits/self portraits taken by Malherbe in which Cahun repeatedly uses costume and cross-dressing to obliterate and reinvent herself. This work on self-image and identity is particularly significant in an artist of Jewish origins, whose cultural frame of reference is essentially aniconic and non-figurative.

The flora and fauna of our domestic and urban landscapes are made up of objects that pass in front of our eyes daily. They are all useful and humble. Some are placed tidily in the bathroom cabinet or in the kitchen cupboard, others on our desk, on the streets or in the garden. They are “semplici formalità” (mere formalities), shining examples of efficient design without any stylistic conceits or frills – which is precisely what makes them timeless and iconic. Giulio Iacchetti has chosen 32 of these pleasingly minimal objects to do justice to them and celebrate their form. He does this through photos taken ad hoc and words, recounting the stories and fascinating facts behind the Staunton chessmen, the Arbre Magique, the Italian Monopoly tokens or an ice-cream stick. The enraptured gaze of the designer is combined with the bright, amused gaze of the user, so that each of these objects becomes the protagonist of his daily life or his memories. A declaration of love and gratitude to these familiar and joyful companions that, with their perfect simplicity, have accompanied our changing habits for decades.