At the Museums of San Domenico in Forli, a major exhibition recounts the myth of Ulysses

From February 15 to June 21, 2020, the San Domenico Museums in Forli are hosting the exhibition Ulysses. Art and Myth, entirely dedicated to the myth of Ulysses and its various declinations and visuals. A myth that has endured and fascinated for three thousand years: from Dante in Canto XXVI of Inferno to Stanley Kubrick in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, from Captain Acab in Melville’s Moby Dick to Borges’ City of Immortals, from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered to Leopold Bloom’s Ulysses to the Kafavis of Return to Ithaca: the great Homeric hero is part of Western culture.

The contribution of art has been decisive in transforming the myth, as well as in continuously adapting, illustrating and interpreting it in relation to its own time. The Forli exhibition therefore aims to offer the public a journey within an epic story that artists have told in marvelous works: from antiquity to the 20th century, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from naturalism to neo-classicism, from Romanticism to Symbolism, and on to contemporary film art.

The exhibition aims to engage the public with an exhibition itinerary that punctuates, reads the presentation, “a story that belongs to us, which in the mirror of Ulysses shows our destiny. For Ulysses is us, our restlessness, our challenges, our desire to risk, to know, to go further. Moving towards the discovery of an unknown and complex ’outside’ that is within us.” The exhibition also promises to be exceptional in terms of the level of loans.

“An exhibition where great art does not appear to be the handmaiden, however wonderful, of history and myth and is not a mere illustration of it,” stresses Gianfranco Brunelli of the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì, which organizes the show, “but highlights how from the direct relationship between art and myth, through the paradigmatic figure of Ulysses, the tale is born and renewed. Because art, by figuring it, has transformed myth. And myth has told the form of art.”

Pictured: Luca Giordano, Ulysses and Calypso (oil on canvas; Rovigo, Pinacoteca dell’Accademia dei Concordi)

At the Museums of San Domenico in Forli, a major exhibition recounts the myth of Ulysses

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