Certosa di Trisulti hosts an exhibition dedicated to Filippo Balbi's bizarre Anatomical Head

The Body and the Idea is an exhibition on Filippo Balbi’s Anatomical Head, the most famous painting by the 19th-century Neapolitan artist, the “pictor egregius” spoken of with admiration in the chronicles of the time, who lived and worked for a long stretch of his life-after the Neapolitan and Roman years-between the Certosa di Trisulti, in Collepardo, and the nearby town of Alatri. TheGottifredo APS Association, through a formula already tried and tested in 2018, with the Exhibition The Christ Revealed on the Pieta by Girolamo Troppa, which relaunched studies on the painter from Rocchette di Torri in Sabina, is now proposing again an exhibition focused on a single work of’art, with the intention not only to acquaint a wide audience with the masterpiece of one of the most singular painters of the Italian19th century, but also to “unveil” the still unexplored meanings of the painting, which, painted in 1854, was exhibited at theUniversal Exhibition in Paris the following year.

Venue of the exhibition (from August 5 to October 29, 2023) - in agreement with the Lazio Regional Directorate of Museums - is the Certosa di Trisulti, an imposing building dating back to the 13th century in whose Refectory Hall the painting is placed at the end of a path that reveals it to the visitor in all its extraordinary details.

The Exhibition is the result of a collaboration agreement with the Department of Molecular Medicine of La Sapienza University, in synergy with the cultural and scientific activities of the Museum of the History of Medicine in Rome, repository of the painting since 1950.

The exhibition is curated by Professor Mario Ritarossi, a painter and art historian who teaches painting subjects at the Liceo Artistico A.G. Bragaglia in Frosinone, and boasts of a small scientific committee whose members are Professor Maria Conforti director of the Museum of the History of Medicine at La Sapienza University in Rome, Dr. Alessandro Aruta, curator of the same Museum, and Professor Marco Bussagli, art historian and professor of artistic anatomy at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Rome.

An important prologue to the Exhibition was the restoration of the painting commissioned by theGottifredo Association to the Koinè cooperative as part of the Coworking Gottifredo project supported by the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale. The restoration, which restored the painting’s original colors and details deteriorated by time, was carried out by Natalia Gurgone and is presented to the public for the first time in this exhibition.

Among the novelties, finally, is the Tactile Translation of the painting for the blind and visually impaired - carried out by 3D ARCHEOLAB - Parma which is accompanied by a training phase with a PCTO (path for transversal skills and orientation) of the Pertini Institutes of Alatri and A. G. Bragaglia of Frosinone; a virtual reality reconstruction carried out by the young artists of the Keiron Group; and an audiovideo by the multimedia technology class of the Licinio Refice Conservatory of Frosinone. Also young are the architects of the Trinomio Group who designed the striking exhibition design.

The sound path is an original work composed for the exhibition by Luca Salvadori, professor of composition at the “Licinio Refice” Conservatory of Frosinone. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Professor Marcello Barbanera, President of the museum pole of La Sapienza University and Director of the University’s Museum of Classical Art, who suddenly and prematurely passed away just in the days when the project of “the body and the idea” was taking shape, also thanks to the adhesion he expressed.

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Certosa di Trisulti hosts an exhibition dedicated to Filippo Balbi's bizarre Anatomical Head

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