Rome, at Gallerie Nazionali d'Arte Antica exhibition on art in Pasolini's cinema

Among paintings, sculptures, photographs and books (totaling about 140 pieces), the exhibition Pier Paolo Pasolini. EVERYTHING IS HOLY - The Seer Body, curated by Michele Di Monte, scheduled from Oct. 28, 2022 to Feb. 12, 2023 at Palazzo Barberini, is a kind of visual montage to discover Pasolini’s production. The exhibition project, coordinated and shared by the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica with the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo di Roma and MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, March 5, 1922 - Rome, Nov. 2, 1975), intends to explore the decisive role of artistic tradition in Pasolini’s cinema and visual imagery, from the Primitives to the Baroque, from the hieratic archaism of Giottesque painters to the subversive realism of Caravaggio, and the theme of the sacred, which, as the title of the entire exhibition reminds us, is the underlying motif of this path.

The choice of the title, Pier Paolo Pasolini. EVERYTHING IS HOLY, is inspired by the phrase uttered by the wise man Chiron in the film Medea (1969), evoking the mysterious sacredness of the world of the underclass, archaic and religious, in sharp conflict with the heroes of a rational, secular, bourgeois world.

Conceived and collectively curated by Michele Di Monte, Giulia Ferracci, Giuseppe Garrera, Flaminia Gennari Santori, Hou Hanru, Cesare Pietroiusti, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, and Clara Tosi Pamphili, the exhibition project interweaves disciplines, media, original works, and archival documents according to three autonomous directions, specific to each venue, but designed to be able to complement each other in order to solicit unprecedented reflections on Pasolini’s production, the cultural influence it has exerted and still exerts on the gaze of the observer from the 21st century.

The exhibition is divided into six sections, entitled to the figures of the body, another transversal theme of the exhibition project that unites the three museums involved. Here the key concept is precisely that of “figure,” which Pasolini found in the writings of philologist Erich Auerbach, understood as a prefiguration of the present in the past and a return of the past to the present. With this in mind, the exhibition intends to focus, not only on the way in which the writer and director deliberately drew on a certain figurative tradition, but also on the forms in which certain images re-emerge in his work, by virtue of their expressive charge and archaic value, in spite of the distance of historical and cultural contexts. The survival of a millennial collective imagination may itself constitute a metaphor for Pasolini’s troubled search for a still uncorrupted primitiveness, imbued with a sense of pre-cultural and pre-institutional sacredness.

The exhibition opens with a Prologue. The Virtual Body of Images, in which Pasolini’s early contact with art history and the world of figures is recalled, during the course at the University of Bologna taught by Roberto Longhi in 1940-1941 and dedicated to the painting of Masolino and Masaccio. This contact, however, occurs mainly through the suggestion of the images reproduced and projected, in a montage that for the young student already has a clearly cinematographic character. On display are images of Masaccio seen in his time by Pasolini, photos and books that document the lasting impression made by these early experiences.

We then continue with the first section: The Epiphanic Body, which addresses the theme of the “revelatory power of the naked body,” as Pasolini himself called it in Theorem. His inspiration draws on the painting of the Florentine Mannerists, Pontormo, in particular, as in the famous tableaux vivants of La ricotta, where, not surprisingly, the director has Giuliano Briganti’s book La maniera italiana (1961) with him on the set as a guide. Another reference point and term of visual comparison for the elaboration of this dimension is the painting of Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque painters, especially for the choice of figures and models represented with an explicit, direct and often provocative and irreverent realism. Caravaggio ’s St. John the Baptist from the Corsini Gallery, two St. John the Baptist by Valentin de Boulogne, one from the Church of Santa Maria in Via di Camerino and one belonging to the museum’s collection, and Spadarino’s Christ Shows the Wound from the Perth Museum and Art Gallery are exhibited here. The paintings are accompanied, as in all sections of the exhibition, by books and photos that testify to assonances, references and suggestions. The second section, The Body of Scandal, instead focuses attention on the crucifix motif. Indeed, the image of the cross plays a recurring role in the director’s production, from the explicit and controversial homage of La ricotta to the exotic imagery of Fiore delle Mille e una notte, and takes on multiple valences: religious, symbolic, mythical, anthropological, not without even autobiographical allusions, making it a universal totemic figure. The symbolism of the cross, in fact, also shapes some of Pasolini’s lyrical experiments, as in the poems “in the form of a cross,” which refer to the ancient and medieval tradition of so-called carminata figurata, which is again an example of that stylistic and epochal, visual and linguistic contamination pursued by the writer. On display are Giovanni Baronzio’s Scenes from the Passion, and Maarten van Heemskerck’s Pietà and Saints, all from the museum’s collection, alongside Giovan Battista Piazzetta ’s Christ Crucified between Two Thieves from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice and Girolamo Romanino’s Pietà with St. Paul, St. Joseph and Pious Women, on loan from the Museo Diocesano in Brescia.

The third section, The Body of Mourning, is devoted to images of the representation of mourning and its rituals, its physical and bodily expression and manifestation. The central symbolic icon is that of the mater dolorosa in the European and Mediterranean artistic tradition, from the early Middle Ages to the Baroque, as well as the image of the Pieta. Here the inspiration of the artistic tradition is re-actualized in the visual materials of the coeval anthropological researches, such as those of Ernesto De Martino, which Pasolini looks at with attention, and which document, through Franco Pinna’s photos, the survival of an ancestral world, now almost “submerged.” Three works from the museum’s collection are on display: the Maria Addolorata by Jean Changenet and the Pietà by Baciccio and Massimo Stanzione.

The fourth section, The Popular Body, addresses the dimension of “popular corporeality,” in its provocative anthropological and social, ideological, economic and, of course, political implications. Again, the sublime and tragic accents of the pictorial representation of marginalization and poverty anticipate Pasolini’s cinematic interests, particularly in the area of Caravaggio-inspired seventeenth-century realism. Again, some anticipations and coincidences are surprising and significant, all the more so when unintentional, such as that between Vincenzo Campi’s famous Ricotta Eaters, on loan from the Lyon museum, and some sequences from the film of almost the same name, La Ricotta. Alongside this are four works from the museum’s collection-Angel Caroselli’s Vanitas, The Beggar, by a Caravaggio painter, Micco Spadaro’s I maccaronari, and Antonio Amorosi’s Contadina con canestro-accompanied by Giacomo Ceruti’s Lavandaia, on loan from the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia.

The exhibition concludes with an Epilogue, The Body Subject, which confronts the complex issue of visual representation as a form of power, and its ideological and ethical implications, as it decides on the forms and conditions in which a subject, a person, can become a “figure,” an object of representation. Not surprisingly, this theme too runs through Pasolini’s work, and is concentrated in his interests in seventeenth-century Spanish theater and the painting of Velázquez, in particular, including through his reading of Foucault’s famous essay in The Words and the Things (1966). The typically baroque yet very modern motifs of the truth of fiction, of specularity and mask, of illusion and desengaño, however, subtend a narcissistic temptation, which constantly reappears in Pasolinian reflection, even to the point of becoming a critique of self-representation in his last images. François Duquesnoy ’s The Dwarf of the Duke of Créqui and Narcissus, attributed to Caravaggio, both from the museum’s collection, close the exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, edited by Michele Di Monte, with texts by Roberto Chiesi, Andrea Cortellessa, Michele Di Monte and Philippe-Alain Michaud. The three volumes accompanying the exhibitions at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Palazzo Barberini and MAXXI venues were produced by 5 Continents Editions, and will be available in all Italian and international bookstores as well as museum bookshops.

Educational activities: from Nov. 13, 2022 to Feb. 5, 2023, every Sunday at 11 a.m., except the first Sundays of the month, scheduled guided tours for adults by Si pArte! ASP.

Exhibitions at the other venues.

The Poetic Body. (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Oct. 19, 2022 - Feb. 26, 2023) The Palazzo delle Esposizioni exhibition starts from the idea that never has a poet, a writer, a director, an intellectual, been so body and embodiment of the word as Pier Paolo Pasolini. In this exhibition Pasolini is seen in a radical dimension of authorship, always lived with the totality of a body that traverses the world and experiences the dimension of physicality as fullness, splendor and tragedy, in an extreme love of life and reality and in an irreducible and prophetic opposition to the subjugation of bodies and faces, even before minds, to conventions and homogenizing normalizations aimed at nullifying the characteristics of individuals and the diverse, surprising, uncontrolled forms of eros.

The Body Politic. (MAXXI, Nov. 16, 2022 - March 12, 2023) At MAXXI, the key to interpreting Pasolini’s work is restored through the voices of contemporary artists, whose works evoke the author’s political engagement and analysis of the social content inspired by his works. The exhibition is conceived as a macro-text that includes a close dialogue between the artists’ works and the more than 200 documents -- including photos and the texts -- related to the last phase of Pasolini’s career, particularly 1975. In the 1970s, Pasolini focused his writing on denouncing the organs of power, which occurred publicly from the front pages of the “Corriere della Sera.” That is why at the center of the exhibition is placed the political body, that is, a set of statements reflecting on the system of anarchy of contemporary power, on sex as a metaphor for consumption and commodification of bodies. The genuineness of the vulgar losing its sacredness, the effects of media consumption on the general public, the new powers read as disruptive forces of the present, and the voice of the artist as an act of protest are the themes that articulate the exhibition.

For the duration of the project, there is a rich program of eventsand performances coordinated among the three venues and involving the Foreign Academies in Rome, the Archivio Luce / Cinecittà and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, NABA and numerous other universities, organizations, and institutions aimed at developing the themes addressed in the exhibition itinerary and more generally to fuel a new debate on the figure and role of Pasolini in the 21st century.

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HOURS: Tuesday - Sunday, 10 a.m. - 7 p.m. Last admission at 6 p.m. BARBERINI CORSINI TICKET: From Oct. 28, 2022 to Feb. 12, 2023 Museum only: Full €12 - Reduced €2 (18-25 year olds). Exhibition only (exhibition space): Full 8 € - Reduced 2 € (18 to 25 year olds). Reduced Pasolini for MAXXI, Palaexpo, Metrebus card and endorsed Atac ticket holders: 6 €. Exhibition and museum: Full 15€ - Reduced 4€ (18 to 25 year olds), Reduced Pasolini for MAXXI, Palaexpo, Metrebus card and Atac ticket holders endorsed 12€. Free: under 18 years of age, schoolchildren and accompanying teachers from the European Union (with prior reservation), students and teachers of Architecture, Humanities (archaeological or historical-artistic address), Conservation of Cultural Heritage and Educational Sciences, Academies of Fine Arts, employees of the Ministry of Culture, ICOM members, tour guides and interpreters on duty, journalists with order card, handicapped persons with accompanying person, school teaching staff, tenured or with fixed-term contract, upon presentation of appropriate attestation on the model prepared by Miur. Reservation recommended on weekends and holidays at the link: https://www.ticketone.it/city/roma-216/venue/palazzo-barberini-16406/ GROUP VISITS: groups of maximum 15 people, guide included, with compulsory reservation at 06-32810 on both weekdays, holidays and weekends. Use of radio systems mandatory. To ensure the smoothest enjoyment by all, the maximum time groups can stay in the museum is 2 hours.

Rome, at Gallerie Nazionali d'Arte Antica exhibition on art in Pasolini's cinema

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