The Madonna of Albinea, painted by Correggio in 1519, stands as a singular compositional and executive pivot at a temporal juncture of the height of the Italian Renaissance; that artistic phenomenon that had already reached the "great manner" and tha...
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The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna offers citizens and international culture an exhibition on Guercino (Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666). A review toward an anthology of works that place the master at the center of seventeenth-century European painting ...
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In 2021, the Art Newspaper chose as its book of the year David Ekserdjian's monumental work The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: an endeavor that we could call "the great reflection" on the greatest pictorial phenomenon of the Italian Renaissance, nam...
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Achille Funi was a pillar of 20th-century Italian artistic expression, and his city is fittingly preparing a solemn exhibition of him at the Palazzo dei Diamanti for October. The painter was born in Ferrara in 1890 and died in Appiano Gentile (Como) ...
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It stands like a marble flower or a snow-white butterfly on the compact red-hot fabric of the ferraiolo brick that clamps the elevation of the comital dwelling erected on the golden principle of the 16th century to welcome sovereigns and most excelle...
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From Saturday, July 8, the cool noble halls of Ferrara's Castello Estense welcome visitors to the superb exhibition dedicated to Arrigo Minerbi (Ferrara, 1881 - Padua, 1960), a distinguished prince of early 20th-century Italian sculpture and a person...
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While the magnificent exhibition Rinascimento a Ferrara. Ercole de' Roberti and Lorenzo Costa - and there shine masterpieces of the highest rank in the context of the golden age of Italian humanism - it will not be inappropriate to grasp the personal...
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On Feb. 18 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, the desired exhibition on the "Renaissance in Ferrara" will happily open, where the figurative arts - maximally the pictorial arts of the great masters Lorenzo Costa and Ercole de' Roberti - will compose a worl...
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In the world of art contemporary to us there is a prestigious entity that stands as a model of extreme seriousness and guarantee towards collectors and amateurs. It is the ALI (Associazione Liberi Incisori) which has been working for several decades ...
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The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna in its rich patrimony holds the historical-artistic axis of the City's pulse, and lately it has opened up to luminous initiatives of extraordinary vitality in connection with important anniversaries or events capab...
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Very noble exhibition the one in Forli, at the cloisters of San Domenico, where in each of the past years we have been able to admire reviews always of high value and exceptional organizational effort. This year the subject is still of a sing...
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Probably between 1526 and 1527 in the context of the magnificent production of his celebrated altarpieces Antonio da Correggio, who was living permanently in Parma where he was directing the difficult wall renovations of the dome of the ca...
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Did Antonio Canova have a "traveling companion" who was such by affection and artistic consonance? The answer must glide to Bologna, the city that gave him as a young man the great teaching of naturalness and empites of life, and which then g...
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A flight! A glittering flight accomplished by a wise bee responding to the ideal figure of an affable and cultured princess as is Maria Luisa Pacelli, director of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. An exploration over a phenomenon that beco...
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A blossoming of rebirth appears in that secularly pulsating place of creativity and work that is the area of Cento, privileged cradle of art and the manufacturing heart between Ferrara and Bologna, which is now emerging with renewed vigor fro...
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Astonishment always accompanies those who wish to delve into the proposals that Correggio gradually poses to us in the youthful progress of his career, where the elements of surprise blossom and impose the extraordinary breadth of...
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First of all, we must talk about Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and remember his dual vocation. He was an authentic painter, a relative of the much older Signorelli, a full-time worker, a quick and tireless draughtsman, a steady and mathematical eye in...
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In Storia dell'Arte in Parma (2020) Maddalena Spagnolo elegantly and effectively sketches a chapter, Nel segno di Leonardo (In the Sign of Leonardo), where she finds the afflatuses of Vinci's genius spilling over into the Po Valley lands and ...
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The title is a heroicomic paraphrase of a well-known poem by Leopardi. The song is nocturnal because the hours of silence are those of memory, of distant contemplation of a lived reality that remains as a vanished pattern. The Honorary Inspecto...
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As neve al sol si disigilla sings Dante at the climax of his Paradise: so at the end of this perilous winter a blazing sun rises over Parma to sprinkle the city's entire life, its awareness of being an incomparable place for art o...
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Among the countless commentators on Correggio, I like to choose the sincere definition given by Édouard Pommier in a personal autograph letter to me in August 2006, where he considers him "an immense artist." Such a judgment coming from the t...
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Dum venĕris was the constant call of a medieval responsory asking God for light: "when you come ... when you come and judge righteously, then you will give us light." It was an invocation of expectation.
In this time stricken by crisi...
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The Covid break allows for a few digressions such as the one that follows here, and of which the reader will forgive me. This year's dazzling Raffello exhibition, luminously curated by my friend Marzia Faietti, not only gave me the opportunity ...
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A triumph: an orchestral, symphonic, solemn, exhilarating triumph, this one by Luigi Magnani, who continues to live in the poetic and suavest world of his villa in Mamiano, one of the unspeakable places for envelopment of thought and idyllic quiet of...
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The over-title of the present essay is taken from a playful poem by Arrigo Boito and takes us back to the steps of art criticism that proceeds slowly and wisely on new discoveries, even on minor appearances, to illuminate connections and knowledg...
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Why Nanni? Because without him the dawn of the Renaissance would lack a most splendid light. Because it is necessary to rebalance the knowledge of the true roots of the Renaissance itself. Because next year will run the sixth centenary of his death a...
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A surprise! A resounding surprise in Modena, where Gianfranco Passoni, the city's legendary master, the great representative of the pictorial tradition of the ducal capital who now returns after one of his typical, long periods of meditation and ...
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Solemn still flows the Pater Padus, lying in its great Emilia-Lombard basin. In the long journey for centuries it has reclaimed two venerable citadels of high prayer and untiring labor among the fields. To the song of the monk Guido, raised with hi...
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We may ask: do the Nights of Correggio have anything in common with The Nights of Cabiria? Do not gasp folks! Fellini's heroine (who conveys so much of her authorship) is vividly imbued with a most human joy, a radiant expression of effervescent ...
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The year of Raphael, which began amid the obvious epidemic difficulties, will nevertheless be dense with studies, re-evaluations, and historical-critical expansions that have already begun to highlight the effects due to the Roman presence of the gre...
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Museums reopen, and silent Exhibitions can rise from the dormancy of cloistered time. The National Gallery of Bologna reopens, and here a fervid review, in itself very rich in multiple motives, can rattle for dignity and conclamation in the well-unde...
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The virus, which has the superb name of "Corona," by extinguishing all social articulation in our beloved country has rendered recondite even some exhibitions that one would like to call "minor," but which always fulfill the function of revealing the...
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Two formidable exhibitions lie locked away, waiting to pour out their extraordinary contents that, at the beginning of this third millennium, certainly re-propose the structural arc of Mediterranean civilization as a perennial path of culture. ...
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In this astonished phase of our social life, the meditative isolation of many can be used as a rediscovery and recovery of wondrous realities that everywhere surround us, each of which certainly carries perennial values. Yes, March was the ancient La...
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You who know what love is...
Cherubino's heartfelt, anxious questioning of Mozart's limpid melody can hardly propose itself before the dazzling Raphael Exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale. It nevertheless contorts every visitor through the unbe...
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Nothing would be remembered and nothing then sung, but on a distant day "beautiful of fates and misfortunes kissed his petrous Ithaca, Odysseus." From there extended the immense myth of the man of "metis," of the infinitude of mental machinatio...
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Glimpse of sky over Reggio Emilia with the arrival of the Portrait of a Gentlewoman from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and what a sky! It is the only large and luminous portrait executed by Correggio that comes to engulf the city at the mom...
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