An exhibition of self-portraits in collaboration with the Uffizi also at Lucca Comics

On the occasion of the 2021 edition of Lucca Comics & Games, which will be held from October 29 to November 1, the exhibitions accompanying the traditional comics and games fair have been opened, and the novelty this year lies in the fact that in Lucca it is also possible to see, in the halls of Palazzo Ducale, an exhibition organized by Lucca Comics in collaboration with the Uffizi Galleries. Entitled Comics in Museums. The Self-Portraits of the Uffizi and curated by Mattia Morandi and Chiara Palmieri, the exhibition is dedicated to Tuono Pettinato, the recently deceased cartoonist and author, for the Ministry of Culture’s Fumetti nei Musei exhibition, of the album set at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

The exhibition is the first of the initiatives included in the memorandum of understanding signed by the Uffizi Galleries and Lucca Crea to foster the development and promotion of comics in Italy and abroad and is the result of collaboration with the Ministry of Culture. On display in Lucca are 52 self-portraits by as many Italian comic book artists, generously donated by the artists who participated in Fumetti nei Musei, the project conceived by the Ministry of Culture and carried out in collaboration with the publishing house Coconino Press - Fandango. After the end of the event, the exhibited works will go to enrich the collection of the Uffizi Galleries. The agreement with the festival also includes the participation of the Uffizi and the Ministry of Culture in the nomination of the Master of Comics of Lucca Comics & Games, as part of the Lucca Comics Awards, and the entry, each year, of the winner’s self-portrait into the Florentine museum’s collection of self-portraits. The agreement will last two years and will be renewable: within its framework, shared initiatives of various types can be undertaken: in addition to exhibitions, also events, cultural productions, creative, educational, scientific partnerships and much more.

“It is our task,” says Uffizi director Eike Schmidt, “to continue the collections established by our predecessors, without abandoning their criteria, which were very strict with regard to the quality and importance of the works, but at the same time it is right to refine the same sensitivity as Cardinal Leopold towards aspects of artistic creativity that have so far remained off the radar, if not actually snubbed. It is obvious that for many decades the main force in figurative and narrative culture around the world (think of Osamu Tezuka, who perhaps surpasses Walt Disney in worldwide circulation and inspiration for other artists) has belonged to comics, an entire universe unfortunately left aside by almost all mainstream museums. Yet it is also through the comparison of comics with paintings preserved in the solemn halls of galleries and libraries that we are able to grasp new meanings in a fifteenth-century predella, or a medieval illuminated codex. Just as knowledge of museum masterpieces enables us to understand in comics many ’cultured’ (and other) visual allusions that would otherwise escape us. For more than a century, figurative oil paintings have no longer been considered the main form of artistic expression: in fact, many other categories and types have gradually been added. It is high time that in the Uffizi’s collection of artists’ self-portraits, which after three hundred and fifty years of growth is now by far the oldest, largest, and most important in the world, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Diego Velázquez, Angelica Kauffmann, Marc Chagall, and Giorgio Morandi were joined by fifty-two cartoonists, ranging alphabetically from Altan to Zuzu. And this is just the beginning.”

In addition to the exhibition of cartoonists’ self-portraits, there are also other events in the halls of the Doge’s Palace. The first is an exhibition on Will Eisner (1917-2005), one of the greatest comic book authors of all time: he is the father of the modern graphic novel, who brought the medium to ultimate maturity. Beginning with the seminal Contract with God (1978), Eisner, who was already coming off an extraordinary career in entertainment comics (notably with his humorous detective The Spirit), became the interpreter of an authorial need that is both artistic and commercially positioned, that of a comic book that presents itself as a “book,” a closed and autonomous work, free to explore even difficult themes. The “Contract” was followed by other extraordinary titles, such as Toward the Storm or Fagin the Jew. The exhibition of the master’s original plates, realized in collaboration with CArt Gallery, will be enriched by unpublished materials and essays selected together with Denis Kitchen, Eisner’s friend and editor.

Again, the exhibition The Thousand Faces of Giacomo Bevilacqua recounts one of the comics phenomena that emerged from the infinite vastness of the Internet, that of Giacomo Bevilacqua, who became popular with the poetic humorous strip A Panda Pleases. He later devoted himself to increasingly ambitious projects, such as the graphic novel Il suono del mondo a memoria and the miniseries for Sergio Bonelli Editore Attica, created in a style somewhere between Italian and Japanese comics and winner of the Best Series award at the 2020 Lucca Comics Awards. Another exhibit is Radice & Turconi: Stories from the House Without North: a couple in work and life, Teresa Radice (texts) and Stefano Turconi (drawings) start from the sunny world of Disney and arrive at novels of great emotional involvement such as Il porto proibito and Non stancarti di andare. If The For bidden Harbor earned them both the Gran Guinigi Award for Best Graphic Novel in 2015, in 2020 Teresa was awarded Best Screenplay in the 2020 Lucca Comics Awards for the ideal sequel to that book, The Pillar Girls.

An additional exhibit is dedicated to the making of the festival’s official poster, which traces the intervening creative process between artist Paolo Barbieri, director Emanuele Vietina and festival art director Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini. Barbieri, former author of L’Inferno di Dante illustrato, published with Mondadori and then in a new edition by Sergio Bonelli Editore is among those selected for the Dante ipermoderno exhibition, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and curated by Professor Giorgio Bacci.

In the photo: Palazzo Ducale, the gallery of statues.

An exhibition of self-portraits in collaboration with the Uffizi also at Lucca Comics

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