In Bologna, Jacopo Valentini's photography exhibition on Dante's imagery

From May 12 to Sept. 18, 2022, the Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna, as part of ART CITY Bologna, is hosting Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell, a photographic exhibition by the young Jacopo Valentini (Modena, 1990), curated by Carlo Sala: this is a photographic project related toDante’s imagery that traces along Italy the actual journeys made by the poet and the literary ones through his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. The author’s works are displayed along the three floors of the museum’s permanent collection, with the aim of creating a formal and ideal dialogue, such as with the colossal statue made by Manno di Bandino that portrays Pope Boniface VIII, a central figure in the Florentine political upheavals that caused the poet’s exile.

The research revolves around three symbolic places, which are interpreted as the gateways leading respectively to Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, points of contact between the narrative of the Comedy and the reality of the Italian territory. The former, the volcanic mouths of the Phlegraean Fields, was for the ancient Romans the cavern of Charon, the ferryman of the souls of the dead beyond the river of Hades, and Virgil in theAeneid places there the descent to the underworld. The Pietra di Bismantova is portrayed by the artist to symbolize Purgatory, following an explicit reference from the text in Canto IV. The Po Delta, on the other hand, is the figuration of Paradise: a place that has no philological connection with the book, but has been adopted as a visual pretext capable of evoking the poem’s suggestions through its characteristic suspended and timeless landscape.

One of the preeminent aspects that Valentini’s research aims to bring out about the relationship between literary text and landscape is how the influence of the former toward the latter was such as to condition the perception of places. Contributing to this process has been the vast amount of figurations of the text over the centuries, which the photographer approached by portraying with the technique of still life some works by Federico Zuccari, Alberto Martini and Robert Rauschenberg. Each authorial work photographed by Valentini is a “cell” of the complex visual universe in perpetual mutation that forms Dante’s imagery and appears as a litmus test of the evolution of society and its relationship with such crucial aspects as morality, religion and power.

The first work visually reread by Valentini in his research is the Dante Istoriato by Federico Zuccari (1539-1609), who in the second half of the 16th century produced a kind of artist’s book, where images become the center of the narrative. The chromatic range adopted by the painter in each cantica accentuates the visual pathos, as is evident in the plates of Inferno done in pencil. In the book’s iconographic sequence, Valentini places the Urbino artist’s drawings between the lava views of Lanzarote and the fumes of the solfataras of the Campi Flegrei, creating a visual analogy between fiction and reality.

The second contribution is that of Alberto Martini (1876-1954), an artist who always maintained a very intense relationship with the Commedia. The occasion was the famous 1900 competition for the Alinari edition, a crucial junction for the figuration of Dante’s poem because it opened to a plurality of modern authorial declinations with the sole constraint of technical reproducibility (not by chance it was promoted by the firm of the famous dynasty of photographers), thus acting as an element capable of further projecting the text into mass culture. Valentini worked at the Pinacoteca Martini in Oderzo, where a corpus of 298 works on Dante’s theme created by the artist, whose stylistic signature lies somewhere between symbolism and surrealism, is preserved.

The third authorial presence is that of U.S. artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who in the late 1950s perfected the “solvent transfer” technique by working on photographic images from magazines of the time, then taken up in pencil and watercolor. In the Malebolge panel, a “transfer drawing” dedicated to the eighth circle of Hell, the athletes who used to camp on the pages of “Sports Illustrated” become characters from the Comedy: Virgil has the features of a tennis player, while the giants are three wrestlers on the podium. In illustrating the Comedy, Rauschenberg seizes the pretext to talk about current events and, by grafting political and social themes onto the poem (his characters include John Kennedy and Richard Nixon), he emphasizes the universality of Dante’s poem.

Prominent among the various still lifes made by Valentini is also the photograph depicting the first edition of Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis, an unfinished attempt to rewrite the Comedy that came out posthumously in 1975, which within the exhibition is a kind of homage to the great writer whose birth centenary falls this year. One of the aspects that most differentiates the artist’s work from the tradition of figurative essays dedicated to Dante’s masterpiece, such as those just mentioned, is that it is a meta-project, which aims to traverse a figurative tradition in dialogue with the present, considering Dante’s poem a complex device that over the centuries has created and layered imaginaries capable of profoundly affecting reality.

Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell is the winner of Cantica21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere - Under 35 Section promoted by the Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. The project Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell is accompanied by a publishing initiative by Humboldt Books, a publishing house specializing in storytelling and travel experiences that brings interdisciplinary projects to life by crossing geography, literature and art. The eponymous volume presents the photographic work in its entirety and is accompanied by texts in Italian and English by literary historian Claudio Giunta and editor Carlo Sala. The publication was made possible thanks to the Italian Cultural Institute in Addis Ababa.

Jacopo Valentini was born in Modena in 1990 and lives and works between Modena and Milan. He approached photography from a very young age, studying first at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (Switzerland) and then at the IUAV in Venice, where he attended a master’s degree in photography. In 2015 he was selected to participate in the Foto Factory Modena project in collaboration with Sky Arte HD and Fondazione Modena Arti Visive. In 2017 he won the 101st Collective Young Artists of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice. In 2019 he is selected for Giovane Fotografia Italiana #07, within the Fotografia Europea circuit, in Reggio Emilia, and wins the Nocivelli Prize. In 2020 he is a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer and is winner of the Refocus call of the MiC - Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with Triennale Milano and MUfoco | Museum of Contemporary Photography. In the same year he is selected for Cantica21 called by MiC and MAECI for the project Concerning Dante - Autonomous Cell, published in a volume published by Humboldt Books. He has exhibited at institutions and private spaces both in Italy and abroad, including: Chiostri di San Domenico, Reggio Emilia; Triennale Milano; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno; Royal Institute British of Architecture, London; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo (Treviso); Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca; La Volonté 93, Saint Ouen (France); Una Vetrina, Rome; Linea di Confine per la Fotografia Contemporanea, Rubiera (Reggio Emilia); festivalfilosofia Modena; Galleria Civica Cavour, Padua; Palazzo del Governatore, Parma; Galleria Civica di Modena; Italian Cultural Institute, Addis Ababa; Italian Cultural Institute, Moscow. His works are in both public and private collections, including: Istituto per i beni artistici, culturali e naturali della Regione Emilia-Romagna; Galleria Civica di Modena | FMAV; Palazzo Rasponi 2, Ravenna; Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; MUfoco | Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan.

The exhibition can be visited during museum opening hours: Tuesdays, Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Wednesdays, Fridays from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturdays, Sundays, holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Ticket: Full € 6, reduced € 3, special reduced for young people between 18 and 25 € 2, free for Culture Card holders. On the occasion of ART CITY Bologna (May 13-14-15, 2022), the ticket is free for Arte Fiera ticket holders. For information visit the Museo Civico Medievale website.

Image: Jacopo Valentini, from the series Concerning Dante (Paradiso XXXI), Fondazione Oderzo Cultura, Treviso. Courtesy Galleria Antonio Verolino, Modena & Podbielski Contemporary, Milan.

In Bologna, Jacopo Valentini's photography exhibition on Dante's imagery

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