Rai5 offers a six-part series on colors in art. It starts with red

Rai 5 is launching a series dedicated to the colors of art as part of its Art Night package: six episodes to tell about as many colors (red, blue, yellow, green, white and black) starting Wednesday, Feb. 15, also at 9:15 p.m. It is Art Night. The Colors of Art, a series to trace a history of art told from a particular perspective, that of the colors and pigments that have made it possible to create man’s most memorable works of art: from cave paintings, to the marvelous Egyptian artifacts, Giotto’s frescoes, Raphael’s paintings, Monet’s, Van Gogh’s, and contemporary art.

Introduced by Neri Marcorè, the series is produced by Mark in video, in collaboration with Rai Cultura, was written and directed by Linda Tugnoli over four years, edited by Sandro Capponi, and aims to offer a different look at art history. The protagonists of art history become pigments, chemical processes, experiments, processing methods, raw material costs, and research adventures. To tell this story, in original footage and exclusive interviews, the most famous places and personalities of art in Italy and the world, but also hidden curiosities and places less frequented by tourism: from the Chauvet caves in France to contemporary artist Anish Kapoor, from the Egyptian Museum in Turin to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, from colors found on classical statues from the Mann in Naples to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from Piranesi’s prints to black and white photography to Harvard’s Forbes Pigment Collection, the oldest collection of pigments in the world, to Michel Pastoureau considered the foremost color expert on the planet.

He opens the series with red, humanity’s first color. In the gorges of the Ardèche, in a glacial France populated by beasts and mammoths, a Cro-magnon clan already has a complex vision of their place in the world, and it is their art that says so. Red has two opposite faces in the history of art as well: in the form of ochre, it is the most naturally available pigment, but it can also be embodied in the highly prized purple, the rare and expensive cinnabar, and the cochineal lacquer that in the time of the conquistadors was worth as much or more than all the silver in the mines of the New World. Certainly since antiquity it has been the protagonist of every artifact of man: from the red ochre of the Paleolithic paintings in the Chauvet cave, described by archaeologist Valerie Moles, from the red of the Egyptians, which Enrico Ferraris curator of the Egyptian Museum in Turin and Paola Buscaglia Centro Conservazione e Restauro La Venaria Reale tell us about, to the famous Pompeian Red protagonist of the frescoes preserved at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, which restorer Gabriella Prisco and Floriana Miele, head of the frescoes section at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, will talk about.

But Italy is also home to one of the only cinnabar mines, on Mount Amiata, now closed and turned into a National Park, as told by the Park’s director, Daniele Ruoppoli, a geologist. With a jump to the other side of the world, we get to the glowing red of Sino-Japanese lacquers thanks to a talk by the Director of the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice, Marta Boscolo Marchi.

Then, if one thinks of red, one can only think of Titian, who characterized the hair of the women he represented so well that he left his name linked to that of the color red. The co-curator of the Milan exhibition L’immagine della donna nella Pittura Veneziana del ’500, Stefano Zuffi, discusses this. And the red of the last Caravaggio, that of Judith and Holofernes, preserved at the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini in Rome, the subject of a restoration described by Carlo Giantomassi and Beatrice De Ruggieri. Up to the red of Anish Kapoor, who caused a stir when he literally invaded Palazzo Manfrin in Venice with red and declares that “the darkness of red is darker than the darkness of black.”

And there are also many curiosities, from the Codex Purpureus of Rossano Calabro, recounted by miniature historian Lucinia Speciale, to the red of the medieval dyers of Lauris, with Lise Camoin, master of natural dyes, to the Ecomuseum of Ochre in Roussillon, France with its Director Matthieu Barrois, to a unique and incredible red, that of the drops of blood studied by restorer Francesca De Vita of Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo preserved at the Alberoni College in Piacenza.

The appointment for this journey into colors with Art Night, a program by Silvia De Felice and Emanuela Avallone, Massimo Favia, Alessandro Rossi, directed by Andrea Montemaggiori, is therefore for Wednesday, February 15.

Rai5 offers a six-part series on colors in art. It starts with red

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