Caravaggio and the contemporary at the Mart in Rovereto: here's the exhibition in Trentino

After much controversy and attempts to block the project, the exhibition on Caravaggio in Trentino at the Mart in Rovereto officially starts: the show is scheduled from October 9 to December 4, 2020, and is titled Caravaggio. The Contemporary. The exhibition brings to the banks of the Adige River one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces, the Seppellimento di santa Lucia, Michelangelo Merisi’s oldest Sicilian work, arriving from the church of Santa Lucia alla Badia in Syracuse. The idea behind the exhibition is to emphasize Caravaggio’s spiritual relevance. Indeed, the intent of the curator, Vittorio Sgarbi (president of the Mart), is to reverberate the 17th-century masterpiece in a selection of contemporary works and photographs.

In 1608 Caravaggio, condemned to be beheaded and continually on the run, escaped from Malta and arrived in Syracuse. It was here that he created The Burial of St. Lucy, intended for the high altar of the Basilica of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, on the site where, according to tradition, the saint was martyred and buried. The scene appears to be set in the dark, subterranean rooms of the well-known latomie below the church, in which the martyr’s tomb is located. According to Sgarbi, the expressive power of the work emerges mainly through the relationships between characters and scenic space, from the tension conferred through darting light and the materiality of the canvas and color. In the walls in the background of the scene, which occupy almost two-thirds of the painting without any figures, the curator invites the contemporary viewer to identify an expressive effect that can be approached from the Informal.

Thus, following the thread of conceptual relationships, the Mart proposes a comparison between Caravaggio’s painting and a selection of works by the great master of Italian Informal art, Alberto Burri: the museum, in particular, exhibits an Iron from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and then a Plastica from a private collection and three works from the Mart’s collection, Rosso e nero, Sacco and Sacco combustione. “The more formal and immediately visible comparisons, resulting from the juxtapositions of tones, materials, atmospheres,” the presentation reads, "are followed by the more conceptual ones. This is not the first time that Caravaggio and Burri have been related. Sgarbi thus intends to deepen a furrow already traced, emphasizing how, at different times, both artists worked and loved Sicily. From the wound on the throat of the saint to the ’wound’ of Burri’s Iron, to the wound of the Sicilian territory. ".

The comparison continues with a work by Cagnaccio di San Pietro(I Naufraghi of 1934, from the Mart’s collection, to recall the theme of death and the corpse lying at the feet of a group of people), Massimo Siragusa’s photographs of Gibellina’s Grande Cretto, paintings by a contemporary painter, and some photographs by Dino Pedriali on the life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Caravaggesque realism,” a note reads, “is embodied in the twentieth century in the figure of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Fascinated by the figure of Caravaggio since his youthful studies with Roberto Longhi, the poet shares with the seventeenth-century master the attention to human types and the crude, realist approach that characterize his descriptions of the borgate. The affinities between the two also emerge in their respective lives, marked by scandals, caesuras, heresies, problems with justice and violent and untimely deaths.”), and three works by a contemporary painter, Nicola Verlato, called upon by Sgarbi to express himself specifically for this exhibition with a painting about Pasolini.

The exhibition can be visited during Mart’s opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Closed Mondays. Tickets for the Mart: full 11 euros, reduced 7 euros. For information you can visit the Mart website.

Caravaggio, Seppellimento di santa Lucia (1608; oil on canvas, 408 x 300 cm; Syracuse, Santa Lucia alla Badia)

Caravaggio and the contemporary at the Mart in Rovereto: here's the exhibition in Trentino

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