Works and artists

When Sodoma Looked to Mantegna: The Lamentation of the Young Man from Piedmont

The career of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, better known as Sodoma (Vercelli, 1477 – Siena, 1549) is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and complex chapters of the High Renaissance, that transitional period between the 15th and 16th centuries, a...
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Organisms on the Threshold. Enrico Minguzzi's hybrids, an expanding painting.

Enrico Minguzzi's cabinet of curiosities is a humble and shy little doodle, a shrine half a meter or so high, with a lock that struggles to close, a glass cabinet hidden in the white half-light of an antechamber of his house in Bagnacavallo. A house ...
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The Ark of St. Augustine in Pavia, a masterpiece of Italian Gothic sculpture

Located in Pavia, inside the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, is one of the pinnacles of Italian Gothic sculpture: theArk of St. Augustine. This imposing cenotaph (i.e., a funerary monument not intended to hold the remains of the deceased, as it...
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A calendar of stone: the cycle of months in Lucca Cathedral

A calendar carved in stone that accompanies visitors along the succession of the seasons, telling the story of man's work, his relationship with nature and the passage of time. It is the cycle of the Months that decorates the frieze arranged on the p...
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Bartholomew Bimbi, the painter who turned fruits and vegetables into marvels

The Villa della Topaia, close to the better-known Medici residences of Castello and Pietraia, still bears the signs of the time when it was a casino of rest and delights for Cosimo III. Two elegant cartouches, placed in the hall of honor, accommodate...
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10 things to know about Max Peiffer Watenphul, the rebel Bauhaus painter

Rome rediscovers one of the most original and independent protagonists of 20th-century Europe, Max Peiffer Watenphul (Weferlingen, 1896 - Rome, 1976), on the 50th anniversary of his death. Until August 23, 2026, the National Gallery of Modern and Con...
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The aesthetics of the unfinished: when art finds strength in the unfinished

There are works before which the gaze slows down, almost without realizing it. Not because of their obvious complexity, nor because of the richness of the details, but because of a more subtle feeling that is difficult to name: something seems to be ...
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The queer before the queer. Tivoli between ruins and desire

Between the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, Tivoli assumed a new role in the European artistic imagination. Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este gradually ceased to be merely archaeological destinations or obligatory...
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Canaletto's Bucintoro on Ascension Day: the liturgy of the Republic of Venice

There was a day in the year when Venice stopped being a city and became a bride. It happened duringAscension Day: forty days after Easter, during the "Feast of the Sensa" ("Sensa" is Ascension in Venetian), the Serenissima donned her richest clothes,...
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The painting that guards the myth of St. George in the heart of Genoa

In the oldest part of Genoa, within the walls of Palazzo San Giorgio, a canvas survives that no other documents attest to, signed by a painter of whom almost nothing is known. It is Luchino da Milano's Saint George Slays the Dragon, dated 1444, an oi...
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The Tabula de Amalpha: at the origins of Mediterranean maritime law

In the history of the Mediterranean, the sea at some point stopped being just a physical space to be crossed and became something more complex: a theater of economic relations, of agreements, of disputes, of shared risks. A place, therefore, to be no...
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Cross No. 20 of Pisa and the transformation of the image of the dying Christ in the thirteenth century

A cross painted to seal the encounter between East and West. A meeting we witness by looking at a large panel (297 centimeters high by 234 centimeters wide) now preserved in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, hanging on a wall in the room whe...
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The Maritime Republics, the birth of a myth: from nineteenth-century intuition to fascism

The concept of "maritime republics" is of relatively recent invention , a formulation owed to a Swiss historian named Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi and in particular to his Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen â...
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Mario and Pico Cellini, restoration pioneers and discoverers of masterpieces

Since the interesting magazine Finestre sull'Arte has rightly wanted to expose to the general public the events that have unfortunately caused the painting known as the Taking of Christ, which my old friend Mario Bigetti discovered and verisimilarly ...
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Valpurga Night in art: witches and enchantments between Faust and nocturnal apparitions

Walpurga Night, still celebrated between April 30 and May 1, represents one of the most persistent and fascinating themes in European culture, a meeting point of folk tradition, religious imagery and artistic reworking. Among the many European tradit...
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Villa Lagarina's baroque theater on the routes between Salzburg and Trentino

A cloudburst of superlatives bathes the paper on which Nicolò Dorigati, a Trentino painter from a noble family, and therefore always well-connected, had tried to state the reasons for the altarpiece, his altarpiece, destined for the church of ...
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