Twentieth Century - Finestre sull'Arte

Lucio Fontana’s *Venezia d’oro* is set to go up for auction for the first time: Christie’s is projecting a price of up to 7.5 million

A Venice defined by light, matter, and space takes center stage in the art market. It is *Concetto Spaziale, Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco*, one of the most significant works from Lucio Fontana’s famous *Venezia* series, which on October 22 wi...
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The Eternity of Painting: Milan Hosts the First Major Posthumous Retrospective Dedicated to Carlo Maria Mariani

What can painting still convey in an era dominated by the contemporary? This is one of the questions that run through the work of Carlo Maria Mariani (Rome, 1931–New York, 2021), an artist who made art history, memory, and culture the foundation of h...
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Mark Rothko: The Black Light Beyond Religion

After Mark Rothko’s death, the critic Harold Rosenberg, a theorist of Action Painting, wrote an obituary for the painter in *The New Yorker*, in which he described him as a “reductive theologian of painting.” He intended that adject...
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Rome: A 1909 landscape by Picabia, on the cusp of abstraction, arrives at Villa Medici

In 1909, Francis Picabia (Paris, 1879–1953) was thirty years old and had already established a solid reputation within the art world. At that very moment, however, the artist decided to reevaluate the path he had taken up to that point: he sold...
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Inspiration from Europe: Three Exhibitions in Vicenza Explore Artistic Dialogues Between Italy and Germany, France, and Spain

“Ispirazione Europa: Artistic Dialogues Between the 19th and 20th Centuries” is launching in Vicenza —a new exhibition project sponsored by the City of Vicenza that aims to explore, through art, the formation and evolution of the European spirit fro...
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An exhibition in Arezzo traces eight centuries of the depiction of St. Francis in art

Eight hundred years after the death of St. Francis of Assisi, Arezzo is celebrating its historical and spiritual bond with the patron saint of Italy through a major exhibition dedicated to the evolution of his image in art. Paintings, sculptures, min...
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From Mental Hospitals to Feminist Struggles: 200 Photographs by Carla Cerati at Palazzo Reale in Milan to Mark Her Centennial

The transformations of Italy in the second half of the 20th century, political and social tensions, Milan’s cultural life, and individual stories are transformed into images and words in the work of Carla Cerati, a photographer and writer who made he...
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Lucio Fontana: The Hidden Side of the Slit Canvases on Display at Tornabuoni Arte in Milan

Hidden on the backs of Lucio Fontana’s famous slashed canvases lies a lesser-known universe, made up of notes, phrases, and personal impressions that reveal an intimate, everyday dimension of his work. This hidden side of the artist’s oeuvre serves a...
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