Works and artists

Ten things to know about Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin is undoubtedly one of the most influential and controversial artists on the contemporary scene, capable of transforming her life into art with a raw, direct and deeply emotional language. Born in Croydon, England, in 1963 and raised in th...
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In Lucca, among the splendors of Palazzo Mansi and its National Museum.

He had been to Lucca, the father of American realist literature. William Dean Howells had arrived in Lucca one day in April, leaving from Pisa under a sun that already at eight o'clock in the morning seemed hot and sickening, he who was used to the c...
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The upside-down world of Yayoi Kusama

"Alice was dying of boredom [...], she had peeked a few times at the book her sister was reading, but there were no figures or dialogue." Yayoi Kusama was also bored to death as a child, forced to read a life not her own through lenses tarnished by o...
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Clio, the enigmatic muse of Artemisia Gentileschi's story.

One of the few works by Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome, 1593 - Naples, c. 1656) to be found in Pisa, the city of origin of the painter's family, Clio, muse of history, a work executed in 1632 in Naples and now housed in the Palazzo Blu in Pisa, is not, ...
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A novel technique in the history of mosaics: the Annunciation in Pisa Cathedral

Entering Pisa Cathedral through the main door, we are greeted by the large apsidal mosaic that stands out imposingly at the end of the nave. In the center, Christ Pantocrator by Francesco da Pisa stands out, while on the right we find the figure of S...
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Gaudenzian cartoons in Turin's Pinacoteca Albertina, a unique Renaissance treasure in the world

It makes no noise, the brush brushing against the canvas. Not even a slight rustle, not even the faintest crinkle. The bristles distribute the color caressing the surface of the canvas without making themselves heard. The paintings are born in silenc...
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Ten things to know about Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938), a pivotal figure inconceptual art since the 1960s, has changed the way the work of art is conceived, challenging the conventions of the museum and the art market. His stylistic signature, the iconic vertical...
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A Pierrot and a Harlequin: artists' children also disguised themselves

We have all been children and all of us at least once in our lives have dressed up at Carnival as we liked. I always loved dressing up as a princess or fairy, because even as a child I had a romantic, dreamy, fairy tale-loving soul, as I do now, and ...
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The mild abstractionism of Gabriele Landi

For some time now, Gabriele Landi has taken to making cardboard or aluminum sculptures that always start from thin, light, simple sheets. They have inaugurated a new strand in his research, a refined, constant quest, always striving to explore the bo...
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Pietro Giarrè in the Charterhouse of Calci: a continuous dialogue between painting, sculpture and architecture

The Carthusian Monastery of Calci, also known as "Certosa di Pisa," is a former Carthusian monastery with a sumptuous structure located in the Val Graziosa, a plain lying between the Pisan mountains. The building owes itself to continuous remodeling ...
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The art of Laure Prouvost, a weaver of confusion and poetry

Imagine you are walking through a museum, the floor creaking slightly under your feet. The soft but uneasy light reflects a kaleidoscope of colors off the walls, while a voice whispers something. You are not sure if it is inviting you or warning you....
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Underwood No. 5: the typewriter that revolutionized the art of writing

Long Island, July 1922. The sound of ticking fingers pressing on typewriter keys spreads throughout the house: it is a hot summer day and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, sitting at his desk, is intent on bringing to life one of the most beloved stories of ...
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From Mount Fuji to Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius: a history of geological art

"We belong to something beautiful," promise the billboards for a multinational cosmetics company. Instead, according to Kant, it is beauty that is inherent in us, and intelligible only through the lens of feelings. The basis of modern thought lies be...
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Mat Collishaw, flowers as fascinating enigmas.

An image composed of 15 shots installed on backlit panels focuses, in a visual synecdoche, on a bullet-hit skull hole. The work is titled Bullet Hole and plays on perceptual destabilization. Up close it creates an interpretive short-circuit that is b...
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The image of power. The portrait of Eleanor of Toledo in Pisa.

The most famous image of Eleanor of Toledo, born Leonor Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici and duchess consort of Tuscany, is surely the one painted by Bronzino and now preserved in the Uffizi: the Portrait of Eleonora di ...
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Signs of Genius: the Museum of Graphics in Pisa.

The University ofPisa is the holder of an extraordinary cultural and scientific heritage, which the Athenaeum has amassed over its very long history, dating back at least to 1343, the year it was officially established, although according to some his...
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