Light in art and homage to Giambattista Piazzetta: here are the two new exhibitions at Palazzo Fava

Starting September 29, 2022, two new exhibitions kick off the new exhibition season at Palazzo Fava in Bologna, both of which can be visited until November 27, 2022.

On the piano nobile of Palazzo Fava, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of the Genus Bononiae circuit. Museums in the City of Bologna, the exhibition Fiat Lux. Lights in the Art and History Collections of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, curated by Benedetta Basevi and Mirko Nottoli and focusing on the function that light has taken on in the history of art while modifying its very language.

The exhibition aims to investigate the dialectic between light and shadow on an artistic level, highlighting the multiple declinations that individual artists have provided in their works: from the use of golden backgrounds in Byzantine icons to Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, from the chromatic-retinal function in Impressionist painting to contemporary art where light becomes a work of art. Forty-five works including paintings, sculptures and installations from the 15th century to the present day from the art collections of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna will be on display. A number of literary excerpts and QR Codes linking to excerpts from films, documentaries and radio podcasts related to the exhibition theme will enrich the exhibition.

The five sections are each identified by a color that visually summarizes the actions of light: “Divine Light: gold,” “Light vs. darkness: shadows,” “Light: the totality of colors,” “Pure light: white,” and “Absence of light: black.” A sixth room, the Rubbianesque Room, is entirely occupied by Fabrizio Corneli’s Sognatrice Vanessa, a paradigmatic work of the entire exhibition in its explication of the concept of image as a creation resulting from the interplay between light and shadow. In the exhibition itinerary, the chosen works intend to restore the dual valence of each color, or absence of color: thus white is linked to birth and death, and shadow is redeemed in some works from its negative valence to become indistinct from which the possibility of new life emerges. Theuse of gold, widespread especially in the Byzantine era, has assumed transcendental value from the beginning, a reference to divinity, as well represented in the Hall of Jason by the halo of Christ the Redeemer by Elisabetta Sirani (mid 17th century) and by the ray that breaks through during the Chanting Rehearsal in the basilica of San Petronio by Felice Vezzani, until reaching its fertile ground of application in contemporary art with Nino Migliori ’s plastic bottles ennobled by gold covering and transformed into Orantes, or with Piero Pizzi Cannella ’s almost philological recovery of the golden background in the Cattedrale cycle. Shadows or ectoplasmic visions emerging from the canvas are Gianni Dessì’s Three People , just as cinema represented through Gianluigi Toccafondo’s photograms from one of his animated films and Sergio Romiti ’s sequence of Compositions, which in its arrangement refers back to film, works present in Ludovico’s Room, is born in the play of light and shadow. Light as the totality of colors is translated, in Albani’s Room, into works that refer to Pop Art, such as #9 by Piero Copertini, and to the Futurist myth of electric light as a synonym of modernity with Alessandro Bruschetti’s Il fulmine, until light itself becomes a means of expression through metropolitan elements such as iron and neon in Cuoghi Corsello’s Suf! The Sala Cesi dedicated to white hosts, among others, Fabio Mauri’s Schermo Carta (Paper Screen ), a place of all projection and at the same time a space of incommunicability; in its meaning of purity and life it materializes in Adolfo Wildt ’s sculpture La madre (The Mother ) and Lucio Fontana’s Ritratto di Fanciulla (Portrait of a Girl ); it is translated, through the informal alphabet, into the asepticity of the language of the technological era in Mario Nanni’s Quadro oggetto (Object Painting ) from the series Mitico computer. Finally, the Pupils’ Room is dedicated to blackness: from the blindness of the protagonist of Johann Carl Loth’s painting Tobias Heals His Blind Father, to the background of Lucio Fontana ’s Spatial Concept to Augusto Murer’sBlack Harlequin, which has lost its colors but not its mocking and impertinent air. In a dark sea float Luigi Mainolfi’s “peaceful eggs,” in a space of ambiguity in which we are not given to know whether they are emerging or sinking.

Also ideally connected to the theme of light is the exhibition set up on the same dates on the second floor of Palazzo Fava: Giambattista Piazzetta. The Ingenious Contrast of Lights, curated by Francesco Paolo Petronelli. The exhibition intends to pay homage to one of the most original and enigmatic painters of the eighteenth-century Venetian art scene, who left his city only once and did so to come to Bologna to become closely acquainted with the art of the Carraccis, who had made their first cycle of commissioned frescoes in Palazzo Fava itself, and of Guercino. His painting, which contrasts the colors and luminosity of Paolo Veronese and Titian with an intimist style, made up of strong chiaroscuro contrasts, is taken up and interpreted by the most important Veneto engravers of the 18th century. The exhibition aims to rediscover and celebrate Piazzetta’s connection with Bologna and theAccademia Clementina, from which he was appointed Academician of Honor, and the intense cultural and artistic relations between the two cities in the Age of Enlightenment.

He was 44 years old Giambattista Piazzetta when, in 1727, he was appointed Accademico d’onore della Clementina in Bologna, thus sealing a bond with the city which had hosted him “for not a short space,” as we read in the Memorie anteposte to the volume Studj di pittura published in Venice in 1760, to observe “with supreme attention the marvelous Works of the famous Carracci, and even more those of Guercino, whose taste, and manner he seemed to want to imitate...”. Bologna is littered with Piazzetta’s traces: the Historical Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts preserves the letter of thanks he wrote for his appointment to the Clementina; the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe dell’Archiginnasio houses four magnificent drawings of “half-figures” attributed to him; a small painting of the Resurrection is on display at the Pinacoteca.

The exhibition is divided into six sections, through which it aims to illustrate the many aspects of Piazzetta’s art through the graphic translation of his works by 18th-century engravers, mainly from the Veneto region. In the first room, heads from life, based on drawings by Piazzetta, by Venetian engravers such as Marco Pitteri and Giovanni Cattini, and German engravers stand out. In the second room, among other works on display are two Studies of Figures among Classical Ruins, counter proofs of sanguine drawings preserved at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, while in the third room the most important eighteenth-century Venetian editions illustrated by Piazzetta. Of note are a very rare edition of Jerusalem Delivered and the painter’s self-portrait, the artist’s only known engraving. Also of interest are the illustrations for theAtlante novissimo, published by Giambattista Albrizzi between 1740 and 1750, which show an unprecedented aspect of the collaboration between the publisher and Piazzetta: all the maps in the second volume are enlivened by vignettes specially drawn by the artist and engraved by Giuliano Giampiccoli (Belluno 1703 - 1759).

The fourth room houses numerous engravings with religious subjects from Piazzetta’s drawings, while the fifth hosts a video illustrating the techniques of ancient printing, alongside engravings by great masters such as Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Salvator Rosa and Francisco Goya, some of whose Caprichos are featured, and Guercino’s Sibilla Samia, an oil painting from the Foundation’s Art and History Collection. The exhibition concludes with a section devoted to the Accademia Clementina, an institution that was coming into being precisely during the years of Piazzetta’s stay in Bologna: among other documents, the aforementioned letter of thanks, dated Oct. 25, 1727, that Piazzetta wrote after his appointment as Academician will be on view.

For info: https://genusbononiae.it/

Pictured is the layout of the Fiat Lux exhibition on the piano nobile of Palazzo Fava

Light in art and homage to Giambattista Piazzetta: here are the two new exhibitions at Palazzo Fava

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