Works and artists

Jadé Fadojutimi: if painting is flesh transformed into gesture

It was unclear whether it was day or evening. The light, filtered through heavy curtains, caught in the pigments still fresh on the canvas, shone in the pools of petrol blue, faded in the somber purples. Jadé Fadojutimi stood there, brush dow...
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Correggio, the fleeing youth: the Gospel in painting and the theological center of the painting

All of Correggio's frescoes and almost all of his mobile paintings are bearers of particular meanings, not often easy to decipher, that explicate values of a Christian scope and that flow from deep meditations which lead to his well-known composition...
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From Garda to Valpolicella, the Veronese landscape in the masters of the 19th and 20th centuries

A recent book by Gabriele Bissolo, published in 2021 but updated in subsequent years in new editions, entitled Painters in Verona 1850-1920 (Edizioni d'Arte Quinta Parete), has collected the biographies of as many as 280 painters active in Verona bet...
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Echoes of sixteenth-century Italian among Elizabethan shadows: the dark universe of John Webster

According to a widespread critical interpretation, the unfolding of English drama between the reign of Elizabeth and that of James I can be divided into three phases, corresponding to different conceptions of life. Early Elizabethan drama (Robert Gre...
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Works of art lost during the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, during which 2,977 innocent people lost their lives and another 6,400 were injured, changed the face of history and resulted in events from which we still suffer consequences today. ...
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The landscape-state of mind: when nature becomes feeling

In one of the most intense passages of Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, namely the narration of the protagonist Andrea Sperelli 's convalescence after receiving a nasty wound in a duel (an episode that marks the end of the first part of D'Annunzio's...
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Ten things to know about Brassaï, the eye of Paris

Brassaï, pseudonym of Gyula Halász (Brașov, 1899 - Nice, 1984), stands as a central figure in 20th-century photography, whose work is inextricably linked to his ability to capture the innermost and most mysterious soul of Paris. Of Hunga...
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The myth of Juno and Argos: this is why so many eyes decorate the peacock's tail

Nature has created true masterpieces in the animal world. One of the most jaw-dropping examples is the peacock: it is as if a painter from who knows where in the universe took pleasure in painting with extraordinary meticulousness an infinite number ...
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Napoleon's portrait in Egypt: the Battle of the Pyramids and the challenge that changed history

At the gates of Cairo, on July 21, 1798, the French army led by Napoleon Bonaparte (Ajaccio, 1769 - St. Helena, 1821) came into conflict with the Mamluk troops in what would go down in history as the Battle of the Pyramids, an episode that from the b...
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Pol Taburet, one of the most dissonant and magnetic voices of young European painting

"Once upon a time" a painting that did not want to reassure. A painting that scratched, that whispered through mute faces and animal paws, a painting that hid behind veils of color and allusions, as if each canvas were the thin curtain between a worl...
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The works of the last Monet: little known, but a painter of great visionary power

Of the entire oeuvre of Claude Monet (Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926), most of the general public, who perhaps also attend exhibitions onImpressionism, tends to know mainly the works of the 1870s and 1880s, those that more than others helped to define t...
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The Pisan Chart, the first nautical chart of the Mediterranean: a masterpiece of ancient cartography

In the panorama of medieval cartography, the birth of the firstportulan chart of the Mediterranean marked a momentous turning point in the way geographic space was conceived and represented, and between the 13th and 14th centuries, a new tool made i...
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Alex Katz's beaches, the summer that never ends

In the painting of Alex Katz (New York, 1927), one of the leading names in American New Realism ,summer never ends. It is not, however, a summer as we understand it in Italy: if anything, Katz's summer should be thought of as a quiet one, far removed...
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Possible first fruits of Lelio Orsi on display in Bari

The exhibition The Gift of Art. Donations Acquisitions Restorations 2004-2025 set up at the Pinacoteca Provinciale di Bari "Corrado Iaquinto," curated by Nicola Zito, until Oct. 10, aims to highlight a specific aspect of the interaction between the m...
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Keith Haring's Best Buddies: an ode to the universal concept of friendship

"Friends will be friends," sang the unforgettable Freddie Mercury. Words set to music that years later continue to express a simple and powerful truth: in life's challenges, in moments of joy but especially in moments of difficulty, it is good to kno...
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The Shadow Project for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the shadow that marked humanity

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, struck on August 6 and 9, 1945 in the first and only nuclear strikes in history, brought unprecedented devastation to the two cities, marking one of the darkest and most decisive pages in mod...
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