Milan, at the Braidense the exhibition that tells all about Alessandro Manzoni

Manzoni, 1873-2023. The Horrible Plague Scourge Between Living and Writing is the title of the exhibition that the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense and Pinacoteca di Brera are presenting on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni’s death curated by Marzia Pontone, scientific director of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, with Giuliana Nuvoli and Marco Versiero.

The exhibition, set up in the Maria Teresa Room of the Braidense National Library in Milan from May 4 to July 8, 2023, through 114 works, books, drawings, and engravings, traces in an original way the figure of the important author through two main moments of his writing marked by the tragic nature of the plague: The Betrothed and the History of the Infamous Column.

Organized in collaboration with the Archivio Storico Ricordi and with the scientific contribution of Casa del Manzoni, the exhibition will ideally lead the visitor through a wide span of time, from the ancient world to the threshold of contemporaneity, through multiple testimonies of the epidemic evil, in its various repercussions. A custodian since 1886 of the rich Manzonian Fund, which includes precious autograph manuscripts, posthumous specimens of the personal library and other priceless family heirlooms, the Braidense thus offers an important opportunity to enhance its heritage and disseminate cultural content on the occasion of the national celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni’s death.

The exhibition intends to go beyond a biographical and intellectual reconstruction of a commemorative nature, but builds an unprecedented exhibition itinerary, paying homage to Manzoni’s pronounced moral sensibility as an erudite historian of the plague and its passionate narrator, placing itself within a more universal perspective, capable of stimulating a choral reflection on the recent experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition to rare and valuable library materials from the Braidense (manuscripts, incunabula, ancient editions), the exhibition in its 17 sectionswill allow visitors to appreciate some remarkable engravings on paper (woodcuts, chalcographies, etchings, lithographs and chromolithographs) selected in synergy with the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Pinacoteca di Brera, from which precious and unpublished drawings in particular come, presented to the public for the first time. The institutional partnership with the Archivio Storico Ricordi will also allow for further thematic insights in the exhibition, starting with a comparison of the legacy of I Promessi Sposi with its direct reference in music through score and libretto, as well as scenic sketches and watercolor figurines for the operatic adaptation of the novel into melodrama.

The exhibition (Scalpendi catalog) will in fact be flanked by numerous external initiatives carried out in collaboration with scientific bodies and actors in the area. Cycles of lectures and book presentations are planned in the Library, conceived as in-depth studies on neuralgic junctions of the exhibition itinerary, with the involvement of experts and scholars from the Universities of Milan, Pavia and Parma; workshops and in-depth tours in collaboration with Teatro Franco Parenti and Piccolo Teatro di Milano for the project "A Milano sette cantieri per Dante Isella," a great Milanese scholar of Manzoni; performance events curated by the cultural association AlmaRosé in a Manzonian itinerary spread throughout the city of Milan, which will involve the Sanctuary of the Madonna dei Miracoli in San Celso, the Church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto and the Refettorio Ambrosiano in Piazza Greco; educational workshops for schools and intergenerational groups on a regular basis, curated by Libri Finti Clandestini; weekly rounds of free guided tours for individual visitors or organized groups, every Monday during the exhibition’s opening period, curated by the institute’s staff, in collaboration with students from the University of Milan’s educational track. Finally, the initiatives of the physical exhibition will be amplified by the virtual exhibition available on the website of the Braidense National Library, which will also allow the enjoyment of additional audiovisual materials aimed at ensuring maximum accessibility of the proposed cultural content.

THE PATH OF THE EXHIBITION

The choice of the exhibition’s thread and collateral initiatives concerns a central theme in the author’s writings: the plague, which together with war and famine represents a crucial question in Manzoni’s thought. The ideal starting point could only be one of the founding books of European literature, the Iliad, which opens with the epic tale of a terrible plague that struck the camp of the Achaeans at the gates of the city of Troy in the tenth year of the siege. However, the tragic combination of war and pandemic does not end with the Homeric verses, evoked through Lorenzo Valla’s humanist translation and the 19th-century versions of Ugo Foscolo and Vincenzo Monti.

Thucydides and Lucretius ferry the visitor from myth to history, entrusting the written word with the living and real memory of the terrible plague of Athens that swept through Attica in 430 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War. From antiquity we then move on to the early Middle Ages. At the close of the Gothic War (535-553), the territories of the Byzantine empire ruled by Justinian were infested by a dramatic epidemic of bubonic plague that, in its climax, came to decimate thousands of people a day in Constantinople alone. The episode, which is also evoked in the exhibition, represented the most significant historical antecedent of the famous Black Death, which reached the European continent from Asia shortly before the middle of the 14th century and in the spring of 1348 came to mow down four-fifths of the inhabitants of Florence. Petrarch and Boccaccio themselves - whose Bucolicum Carmen and Decameron are exhibited respectively - did not shy away from the burning actuality of the pandemic, elaborating in verse and prose the dramatic collective mourning of their land. To the voice and printed works of historians such as Bernardino Corio and Giovanni Simonetta is entrusted the memory of the plague and typhus epidemics that raged through the Duchy in the second half of the fifteenth century, before the city and the surrounding territory were struck again by the disease in 1576- 1578 and 1630.

The second of the so-called Borromean plagues, aggravated by the famous hunt for anointers, would later be immortalized forever by Manzoni in his works and constitutes the juncture between the historical journey and Manzoni’s literary lunge, the heart of the exhibition narrative. The plague “horrible scourge” represents for Alessandro Manzoni a narrative engine and a merciless observatory on the moral, social and political fragilities of humanity in seventeenth-century Spanish Milan. From La Vaccina to the ventisettana and quarantana of I Promessi Sposi(The Betrothed), Manzoni’s papers housed in the historical holdings of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense accompany the visitor through the author’s civil, literary and imaginary universe, with a lunge at the famous passage of the farewell to Cecilia, while further narrative suggestions are evoked by Francesco Corsi’s coeval series of engravings inspired by Gallo Gallina’s preparatory drawings.

We then delve into the Storia della Colonna Infame (History of the Infamous Column), an instrument of denunciation of the arbitrariness of the judicial system in the trials of the untori (untellers) in dialogue with the writings of Verri and Beccaria, through an other-hand copy of the first draft with autograph corrections and the graphic study for the frontispiece of theGuglielmini-Redaelli edition entrusted to Francesco Gonin (whom Manzoni himself described as an “admirable translator” in the image of his work and the main creator of the authorized illustrative cycle of the quarantana of I Promessi Sposi).

Other sketches by Gonin, inspired by Manzoni’s episodes set in the lazaretto, introduce the reflection proposed in the exhibition on this place of pain, segregation and care, in dialogue with European parallels between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as an imperishable testimony to the universal circulation of possible models of human society in the face of life’s frailties. Moreover, the expressive power of the Manzonian universe with respect to the themes addressed inspired, from the very beginning, a long series of transpositions into different artistic languages, which fueled its fortunes, flanking the more strictly literary takes on the works d’après Manzoni. Of particular interest were the nineteenth-century adaptations for the theatrical genre of melodrama, to which scores and sketches from the Archivio Storico Ricordi gave voice in the exhibition, illuminated by the series of watercolor figurines that Giovanni Pessina executed for the costume rehearsals of the characters in the final act of the opera by Errico Petrella and Antonio Ghislanzoni, while the backdrop of the scene featured the lazzaretto.

Thus, while the lazaretto returns as an iconic site of the pain of human life, but also of the bond of solidarity that sustains living beings, the exhibition itinerary guides the visitor to another central theme of the irruption of the disease, incomprehensible and violent, in the daily life woven with creativity of musicians and literati: the fear of death. In Verdi’s and Mascagni’s letters to Giulio Ricordi, as well as in Manzoni’s own missives and notes, living and writing intertwine and blur, laying bare the weakness of the artist - not unlike ordinary people - in the face of the small and large dramas of human existence.

Statements

“Alessandro Manzoni is one of the loftiest figures of Italian literature but above all a protagonist of the Risorgimento. His ideal of fatherland and nation still remains highly relevant, as does the idea of a civil commitment permeated with morality. He had the merit of anticipating the substance and form of the modern novel,” says Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano. “I think it is always worth reflecting on the universality and contemporaneity of Alessandro Manzoni. These are the two elements that substantiate his greatness and make him a timeless writer. History is for Manzoni always a contemporary fact, but it expands to build a philosophical and moral universe . I hope that the celebration of the 150th anniversary of his death will become a shared moment to enhance the expressive relevance of Manzoni’s universe. The exhibition Manzoni, 1873-2023. The plague ’horrible scourge’ between living and writing can be an opportunity to go further and, through an unprecedented exhibition itinerary, focus renewed attention on Manzoni and his philosophy.”

“War, famine, pestilence, death: the four horsemen of the Apocalypse that dominate today’s headlines are also at the center of the Braidense Library’s exhibition, which shows how the words of a great writer can help us face the challenges of the contemporary world,” says director James Bradburne, director of the Brera and Braidense Art Galleries.

“In an ideal journey between past and present, under the banner of the Manzonian triad of epidemic, war and famine, the exhibition questions today’s and tomorrow’s visitors on the universal themes of illness, death and cure, made even more topical by the recent complex years of the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Marzia Pontone, scientific director of the Braidense National Library.“The dialogue is open with the city, international guests and generations: while the virtual exhibition amplifies the accessibility of remote fruition, the collateral projects reinforce the in-presence visiting experience through educational workshops for children and young people, walking circuits and theatrical performances in some of Manzoni’s places such as the Sanctuary of the Madonna dei Miracoli in San Celso, the Refettorio Ambrosiano in Greco and the church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto. The exhibition thus leaves the physical confines of the Maria Teresa Room of the Braidense Library to expand to the participatory dimension of the entire community, called to rediscover itself through the Manzonian narrative strand of The Betrothed and the History of the Infamous Column.”

Milan, at the Braidense the exhibition that tells all about Alessandro Manzoni

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