Palazzo Spinola between art and poetry. Tinti's Hercules meets Haber's voice

On the occasion of the XXVth International Festival of Poetry, curated by Claudio Pozzani, the National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola, in Genoa, presents Hercules, a series of poems that writer and poet Gabriele Tinti composed inspired by paintings by Gregorio de Ferrari kept in the palace. The canvases depict four episodes related to the myth of Hercules: Hercules and Antaeus, Hercules and the bull of Crete, Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna, and finally Hercules at the funeral pyre, and the unpublished texts will be read on Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 5 p.m. by Alessandro Haber, among the leading actors in Italy.

This is a unique opportunity to admire Gregorio de Ferrari’s paintings while listening to Tinti’s verses recited by Haber.

The Palazzo Spinola event is part of the writer’s overall project focused on masterpieces of the ancient world. The project has involved a number of major actors in recent years, including Joe Mantegna, Marton Csokas, Robert Davi, Burt Young, Vincent Piazza, Franco Nero, Enrico Lo Verso, Luigi lo Cascio and Alessandro Haber, and some of the world’s most important museums, such as the Metropolitan in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, the British Museum in London, the National Roman Museum at Palazzo Massimo and Palazzo Altemps, the Capitoline Museums, the Ara Pacis Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Naples and many others.

The poet defined his Hercules series in these words, “This series of ecphrastic poetry attempts to reactivate the now-lost aura of the work of art, of all those relics of worlds and heroes -- of a humanity -- that are no more. The tragic sense of death, of vacuity, that belongs even to our masterpieces that would like to be eternal, the indeterminacy that has often surrounded their attributions, the sometimes purely hypothetical character of the studies, the mutilated fragmentariness with which they have almost always come down to us from antiquity, have provided me with the cue to talk about the transience of life, of every work of man, of the meaning of time for us. Not even our works are immune to it, as well as what we most revere. Despite our desperate attempt to preserve and resist them.”

Free admission subject to availability.

At 4 p.m. there will be a guided tour of Gregorio de Ferrari’s works, for which reservations are required at 010.2705300.

Image: Gregorio de Ferrari, Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna (late 17th century; oil on canvas, Genoa, Palazzo Spinola)

Palazzo Spinola between art and poetry. Tinti's Hercules meets Haber's voice

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