New book by Jacopo Veneziani, the young art historian of popularization promise, is released

After the success of his publishing debut with the book #divulgo (an account of several centuries of art history conducted through the analysis of some great masterpieces), for the young art historian Jacopo Veneziani comes the second publication, again for Rizzoli types: it is Symmetries. Observing Yesterday’s Art with Today’s Gaze (175 pages, 22.90 euros, EAN 9788891831545), in which Veneziani compares pairs of great artists to offer the reader surprising and revealing juxtapositions. Veneziani, a native of Piacenza, born in 1994, is the new face of art-historical popularization: a doctoral student at the Sorbonne and a specialist in the eighteenth century, he first won over the social media audience thanks to his Twitter account, which is followed by nearly 40 thousand followers (@JacopoVeneziani: every day he spreads and comments on images of works of art with the hashtag #divulgo, which has become something of a trademark of his), and then he captivated television audiences, becoming one of the faces of the program Le Parole della Settimana on Rai3 and serving, also on Rai3, as a juror for Il borgo dei borghi.

His “dream” is to follow in the footsteps of Alberto Angela, but it can be said, without fear of contradiction, that Veneziani has little to envy the undisputed king of television popularization. Elegant, posed, engaging, and rigorous, Jacopo Veneziani is the great promise of culture on television, and one can only hope that his meteoric rise will go on unstoppable: and for those who do not yet know him, the book Symmetries may be a good starting point to familiarize themselves with his modus operandi. The main characteristic of Veneziani’s popularization, in addition to the narrative freshness that distinguishes both his television presence and his editorial products, is his ability to deal with topics by telling stories without falling excessively into the anecdotal and by bringing out the reasons why we observe and admire a work of art from the past today. This is also the case with Symmetries.

The cover of the book

Comparisons between even seemingly very distant artists (here are all the pairs: Masaccio and Lucio Fontana, Caspar David Friedrich and Mark Rothko, Paolo Uccello and Marcel Duchamp, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Egon Schiele, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Piet Mondrian, Johannes Vermeer and René Magritte, Rosso Fiorentino and Henri Matisse, Gustave Caillebotte and Edward Hopper, the Master of the Triumph of Death and Pablo Picasso, Francisco Goya and Hilma af Klint) are not the playthings of a jaded scholar, but are underpinned by a high-level theoretical framework that Veneziani makes explicit in his introduction. “To the ears of many scholars,” Veneziani argues, “to claim that a Beato Angelico fresco resembles Jackson Pollock’s dripping is an aberration equivalent to claiming that Julius Caesar was killed by a gunshot.” Instead, what if for once one tried to observe the works of the past “without pretending to ignore the paths taken by the art of later centuries”? Veneziani cites Georges Didi-Hubermann (who first juxtaposed Beato Angelico with Jackson Pollock), who stated that “not only is it impossible to understand the present by ignoring the past,” but “it is necessary to know the present (rely on it) in order to understand the past and already ask it the right questions.” Before Didi-Hubermann, Veneziani continues, "the German art historian Carl Einstein had stressed the need to abandon all those positivistic, evolutionary and teleological models that often underlie the historical analysis of images, and Walter Benjamin had declared that he wanted to ’brush in the opposite direction the overly glossy hair of history’ to ’reveal the underlying skin, the hidden flesh of things.’ Encouraged by the works of Didi-Hubermann, Einstein, Aby Warburg and others, Veneziani has tried to take the risk of anachronism without, however, indulging in “delusional subjective interpretations,” he warns, “using it as a pivot to establish unprecedented comparisons and thus try to unlock new points of view on the art of yesterday and today.” The reason for this operation? To understand the developments of art through the past while at the same time considering certain aspects of ancient works that can emerge with the help of twentieth-century artists.

The starting point is entrusted to the Masaccio-Fontana comparison: just as Masaccio had conquered the third dimension in painting, opening the “window on the world” theorized in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, so Fontana intended to develop a new conception of space by nullifying the distances between the object and space, bringing the viewer back to reality through the cut, not limiting himself to representing space, but pushing himself to create it with holes and cuts capable of leading the viewer to a new dimension. “Going beyond the usual plane of the painting,” Veneziani writes, “meant diving into the void, drawing a trajectory toward the unknown like the one followed by Apollo 11 in July 1969, ten months after the artist’s death, to take the first men to the moon.” Masaccio and Fontana, then, linked by the revolutions they both brought by radically renewing the conception of space as it was understood until the moment their star traveled the art sky. For Friedrich and Rothko, however, the commonality is in attitude: indeed, in the German artist’s Monk by the Sea we see a monk in a contemplative attitude in front of an empty landscape, constructed by “superimposing a thin strip of land, the treacherous waters of a bio sea and an immense gray sky laden with clouds, three horizontal backgrounds a step away from abstraction that seems almost to anticipate Mark Rothko’s painting.” Friedrich’s painting makes the landscape become a place where the interiority of the painter and the interiority of the viewer meet: in Rothko much the same thing happens, since the Lithuanian-U.S. artist went beyond the idea of the “medium” (the figure of the monk) to make “we ourselves are the monk in front of the sea, standing in contemplative silence, as if we were watching a sunset or a moonlit night,” wrote art historian Robert Rosenblum.

Jacopo Veneziani

Another comparison, another theme: it is on theself-portrait that the dialogue between Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Egon Schiele is set. The French artist made extensive use of the self-portrait, which in her art becomes a way of conveying “the thoughts on canvas of an artist who (experiencing on her own skin the turbulent transition from monarchy to the modern state,” Veneziani writes, “did not cease for an instant to question her being a woman, mother and painter.” Similarly, Schiele regularly used the medium of self-portraiture to orient herself in a profoundly changing world: it is on this territory that Veneziani establishes the link between the two artists, separated by a century. And separated by about a hundred years are also Francisco Goya and Hilma af Klint: just as Goya sought to explore the deepest abysses of the human being (evil, violence, negativity), in the same way the Swedish painter wanted to venture into similarly unexplored worlds, to try to represent what could not be seen, anticipating the researches of artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, considered the pioneers ofabstract art (recent studies have shown how Hilma af Klint came to abstraction a few years before Kandinsky).

Each chapter of Symmetries presents the reader with appropriate quotations from art historians and critics who have dealt with the artists Veneziani discusses, and at the end of the book an essential bibliography can be found to further explore the volume’s topics: behind Jacopo Veneziani’s popularization there is a traditional and accurate work on the sources, which leads in the end to a young product, able to captivate the audience with a clear, unadventurous exposition, which rigorously follows the canons of scientific popularization and briskly proposes itself to the reader, without simplifications (or, worse, trivializations), but with the ability to make even the traditionally more hostile artists more accessible (such as Paolo Uccello, Mondrian, Fontana and Rothko themselves), to compose an “alternative” art history (for the public, but not for scholars, since it is well grounded in the scientific literature) and which, moreover, in the case of Symmetries, eschews the logic of “liking” artists. An author, Jacopo Veneziani, who, if he continues on this path, will be talked about for a long time to come and (we want to bet) will soon become one of the most familiar names to the general public.

New book by Jacopo Veneziani, the young art historian of popularization promise, is released

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