Recycling beauty: the Prada Foundation's exhibition on reusing classical art

From Nov. 17, 2022, to Feb. 27, 2023, the Fondazione Prada will present the exhibition Recycling Beauty, curated by Salvatore Settis with Anna Anguissola and Denise La Monica, at its Milan headquarters. The installation is designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA.

The exhibition project is proposed as anunprecedented survey entirely devoted to the theme of the reuse of Greek and Roman antiquities in post-antique contexts, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. The exhibition is part of a more extensive investigation that Fondazione Prada has been undertaking since 2015 when it presented simultaneously in its Milan and Venice spaces Serial Classic and Portable Classic, two exhibitions curated by Salvatore Settis (with Anna Anguissola in Milan and with Davide Gasparotto in Venice) and designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA. The premise of this research is the need to consider the classic not only as alegacy of the past, but as a vital element capable of affecting our present and future. Topics such as seriality, reuse and recycling in art are closely related to our conception of modernity, but they also testify to the persistence of certain classical values, categories and patterns. Through an innovative interpretive approach and experimental exhibition modes, ancient heritage, and in particular Greco-Roman heritage, becomes, as Settis puts it, “a key to access the multiplicity of cultures in the contemporary world.”

Recycling Beauty intends to focus on the moment when the ancient piece abandons its initial or ruined condition and is reactivated, acquiring new meaning and value through the gesture of reuse. Each element of reuse not only modifies the context in which it is placed, but is itself modified by it in a mechanism of mutual legitimization and attribution of meaning. Exploring the fluid and multiple nature of art objects that change in use, reception and interpretation over time is equivalent to reflecting on the unstable and transformative nature of art processes. “Re-use involves the coexistence of different temporalities, where historical distance and narrative and emotional simultaneity are continuously intertwined. Ancient-Roman marbles belong to the same cultural horizon as those who reuse them, and therefore appropriating them is felt as natural. But the dimension-time escapes the calendrical sequence; it is unstable, it can be manipulated and bent,” Settis explains. “Why take from the ruins a relief, a vase, a capital? Why transport it elsewhere to place it within a new context? The answers explored in recent decades go in three complementary directions: reuse can have memorative value (aimed at the past), foundational value (directed at the present), or predictive value (oriented toward the future). In the absence of documents it is often difficult to decide which of these intentions prevailed from case to case; and it is well possible that they were simultaneously present [...] Heart and stimulus of the gesture of reuse is often, or perhaps always, ’to insert the past into the future,’ as Reinhart Koselleck argues, to predict or determine its developments. The new context absorbs what it reemploys, but it must (and wants to) leave it recognizable even as (indeed, precisely because) it takes hold of it.”

Conceived by Rem Koolhaas/OMA with Giulio Margheri, the exhibition unfolds in two buildings of the Fondazione Prada, the Podium and the Cistern, as a journey of historical analysis, discovery and imagination. The layout of the Podium invites visitors to engage with the exhibits with different intensities. A landscape of low acrylic plinths allows visitors to perceive the exhibits as a whole, while workstation-like structures invite closer examination through the presence of office chairs. In the Cistern, the audience encounters the objects gradually, in a sequence of spaces that facilitate observation from alternative viewpoints: from the height of a balcony, to the narrow perspective of a room built within one of the existing rooms. Some parts of the project come from materials from previous exhibitions hosted at the Prada Foundation. The acrylic bases, for example, were first used in 2015 for Serial Classic and add a spatial dimension to the key theme of Recycling Beauty. The installation aims to emphasize the great artistic and historical value of the works presented, but also to demonstrate how they are the product of migrations, transformations, and evolutions of meaning. By highlighting the importance of fragments, reuse and interpretation, the project contributes to considering the past as an unstable phenomenon in constant evolution. This layered itinerary hosts more than fifty highly representative works of art from Italian and international public collections and museums, such as the Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums and the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

A group of works testifies to how, although the immense ruins of Rome after the fall of the Western Roman Empire shattered within a few generations, those remnants were seen as a vast repertoire capable of preserving and renewing latent values and symbols of antiquity. Two rooms of the Cistern will be dedicated to the colossal statue of Constantine (4th century AD). Two monumental marble fragments, the right hand and the right foot, usually displayed in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, will be juxtaposed with a 1:1 scale reconstruction of the Colossus, never attempted before, which highlights how the work is the result of the reworking of an older cult statue, probably of Jupiter. This project is the result of a collaboration between the Capitoline Museums, Fondazione Prada and Factum Foundation, whose scientific supervision was overseen by Claudio Parisi Presicce, Capitoline Superintendent of Cultural Heritage. After the exhibition, the Colossus will be displayed at the Capitoline Museums. Another core of works reflects on how the transformation of ancient works of art into decorative elements, while damaging their integrity and their original context, paradoxically ensured their preservation. Two examples are the marble mensa with a relief of the life of Achilles (4th century AD) and cosmatesque decoration (13th century) that decorated the ambo of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome from the 13th century to 1743, and the Dionysian marble crater (1st century BC) signed by the Athenian sculptor Salpion and reused as a baptismal font in Gaeta Cathedral. Some works in the exhibition investigate the functional, political or religious reasons for the reuse of antiquities. Such is the case with the Hellenistic-era sculptural group of the Lion Biting a Horse (4th century B.C.), which in the Middle Ages was placed on the Capitol and became an allegory of good city government. Also exemplified is the reuse of ancient burial monuments decorated with mythical scenes that no one could read anymore, except as generic evidence of the greatness of a vanished empire or the defeat of paganism. Among them, a Dionysian sarcophagus from Cortona (2nd century AD) reused in 1247 as the tomb of Blessed Guido, and an Etruscan urn (2nd century BC) recycled in 12th century Pistoia to hold the relics of St. Felix, but without recognizing the depiction, centered on the founding myth of the Olympics, will be on display. The semantic instability of reused ancient artifacts, that is, their continuous mutation of meaning, will be illustrated by a funerary relief (1st century AD) once displayed on the facade of the Casa Santacroce in Rome. Inscriptions added in the 15th century interpret the figures of the deceased as Honor, Amor and Veritas. Incorporating this relief into a new context meant not only paying homage to Roman art, but more importantly transforming that ancient depiction into a modern model of moral conduct. This is the same principle followed in the 15th century by those who placed seven ancient male heads carved in marble on the facade of Palazzo Trinci in Foligno, transforming them into allegories of the seven ages of man. Other works exhibited in Recycling Beauty describe the rediscovery or rebirth of ancient artifacts that from forgotten ruins or neglected elements of the past become prestigious collectibles, triggering a dual process of dispersal and concentration. This is what happened twice to the funerary stele “of the Palestrite” (450-430 B.C.) depicting the figures of an athlete and an ephebe. It arrived in ancient Rome from Greece as a collector’s item, resurfaced in the collection of a cardinal in the early 16th century, but in 1701 was cut in two and obliterated and finally reassembled in 1957 at the Vatican Museums. An even more circuitous journey, intertwined with the emergence of the phenomenon of antiquities collecting, is that of the thirteen sculptural fragments of the Thrones of Ravenna. They are all that remains of twenty-four slabs dated to the mid-first century CE that depicted the empty thrones of as many deities expected at a banquet-a theme of remote Mesopotamian origins that would later reach Christian and Buddhist iconography. Beginning in the 12th century, some of the reliefs began to circulate in small towns (Biella, Treviso, Foligno), and only later in major art centers such as Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, Fontainebleau, and then Paris. For the first time, Recycling Beauty will show all surviving reliefs together, in original or cast form.

Another core of works on display explores the short-circuit between different temporalities that is triggered when art objects are mistaken for antiquities, even though they are from the modern age. One example is the horse’s head made by Donatello in the mid-15th century for the Castelnuovo arch in Naples, which until just over two decades ago was thought to be of Greco-Roman age. Research at the Recycling Beauty site later showed that the statue known as “of Paris,” formerly placed on a spire in Milan Cathedral and believed to be Roman in age, should instead be dated to the 16th century. In the vast process of devastation and gradual oblivion of much of Greco-Roman art, only those objects deemed particularly valuable have often been saved. Among these, the bronze statue of a Camillus (1st century AD), donated to the City of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471, and a pair of Baroque-era works, the Moor Borghese and La Zingarella, reassembled in Rome by Frenchman Nicolas Cordier by mixing ancient fragments with parts of his own creation, will be on display. The two statues had been together since the early 17th century in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, while today the Moor is in the Louvre in Paris and La Zingarella in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Other objects in the exhibition can be categorized as true treasures that have survived the ravages of time. Such is the case with the Farnese Cup (2nd-1st century B.C.), the largest cameo in hard stone from antiquity that has come down to us.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Fondazione Prada will publish an extensive illustrated volume. Through various contributions, the theme of reuse in art and architecture will be analyzed from different historical, artistic and philosophical perspectives with the aim of outlining a history and recognizing the continuity or consonance of these practices with thoughts and experiments of our present.

For info: foundationprada.org

Image: Lion Biting a Horse (4th century B.C., Rome, Capitoline Museums, Palazzo dei Conservatori) © Rome, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali

Recycling beauty: the Prada Foundation's exhibition on reusing classical art

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.