Works and artists

10 points for understanding the art of Vilhelm Hammershøi

Vilhelm Hammershøi (Copenhagen, 1864 - 1916) is one of the most fascinating figures in European painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in Copenhagen, he was one of the greatest Danish artists of his time and experimented wit...
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Giovanni Costantini, the young man before the real thing: the 19-year-old artist's unpublished self-portrait

In the silence of a late 19th-century Roman studio, a young artist portrays himself while looking at some works on paper. Behind him, on the wall, are hanging paintings. On the table are the working tools: the papers, the brushes, the jars with color...
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When contemporary mosaic is a hymn to life. The art of Enzo Tinarelli

To see Enzo Tinarelli's mosaics it is necessary to see his painting; to see his painting it is necessary to get lost in the midst of his mosaics; to grasp the soul of his art, it may be useful to review a contribution that, it was the early 2000s, Va...
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Picasso, or the modern artist as despot and advertising tyrant

Riccardo Bacchelli had a vivid youthful memory of Picasso, an ungrateful memory. He was then, 1911, practicing as editorial secretary at Prezzolini's Voce, even putting articles on the page. "For some time," Prezzolini would write in Il tempo della V...
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How Giovanni Fattori drew: the sheets from the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome

Giovanni Fattori's drawing, wrote Barna Occhini in 1940, in an article in Frontispiece, "is the most expressive that can be given, but the most reluctant to express itself in words." Occhini, in fact, immediately disregarded his catch-phrase, since h...
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Brief history of Italian tourism posters

At the end of the 19th century,Italy, then a young nation that had just been unified, was still a land of deep regional differences, disconnected cities and countryside, and strongly rooted local cultures. However, major economic and infrastructural ...
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Metamorphosis of creation and perception in the new Technologies of Art

This text is about the connection between art and technology. And I’m talking about technology that genuinely enables the creation of art. Technology as a protagonist, companion, and at the same time an indispensable tool in the creative pr...
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Ten things to know about Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, important Portuguese painter of the 20th century

Portuguese artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, 1908 - Paris, 1992) was an enigmatic and multifaceted figure in the 20th-century art scene, rediscovered in Italy in 2025, just over 30 years after her death, with an exhibition at the Peggy Gug...
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A splendid unpublished work by Louis Finson: his converted Magdalene, exhibited in Treviso

A splendid unpublished work by Louis Finson (Bruges, 1580 - Amsterdam, 1617), a beautiful Conversion of Magdalene is being shown for the first time to the public on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated precisely to the theme of the sinful saint, M...
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Savoldo incognito at Palazzo dei Diamanti

The recent exhibition on the sixteenth century in Ferrara curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli brought back to attention once again the Madonna and Child in Glory, Musician Angels and Saints Paul, a Saint, Matthew, Catherine of Alexandria a...
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Giuseppe Veneziano, Beyond provocation. When art is profound without being obscure

There is a widespread idea, almost a stereotype, about Giuseppe Veneziano. He is often labeled as a provocateur, an artist who uses simple, direct, almost populist images. But all you have to do is sit with him, talk to him, listen to his take on art...
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Ten things to know about Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1946 - Boston, 1989), an emblematic and provocative figure of 20th-century photography (on view at the Stanze della Fotografia in Venice with Robert Mapplethorpe. The Forms of the Classic, from April 10, 2025 to January...
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The secret pleasure of looking: voyeurism, between art and forbidden books

Pleasure is a game of shadows and reflections that has always climbed into the impalpable fabrics of art, enveloping each work in veils of mystery and desire in which the gaze sneaks furtively from a curtain raised with studied lightness, from a smal...
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When artists dissected corpses (and anticipated science)

In a paper preserved at the Royal Library, Leonardo da Vinci writes that, in order to be able to accurately draw the veins of the human body and have "full knowledge of them," he had "disposed of more than ten human bodies, destroying every other mem...
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What are the trends in young contemporary painting today? A quick overview

Those who are used to flipping through art magazines know that art magazines like to offer their audiences looks and analysis in the form of rankings. The ten best booths at the fair, the twenty artists to watch out for, the thirty exhibitions of the...
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The Palazzina di Caccia di Stupinigi, the Savoy residence of unexpected wonders

What is a deer doing on the dome of one of Piedmont's most fascinating Savoy residences ? Imposing and regal with its stage of well-branched antlers, the animal that has become the symbol of the Stupinigi Hunting Lodge stands out in the sky as if it ...
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