Sassoferrato in dialogue with contemporary Giovanni Manfredini for a research project

Friday, Oct. 11 at 5 p.m. at the Palazzo degli Scalzi in Sassoferrato (Ancona) opens the seventy-third edition of the International Art Review | G. B. Salvi Prize with the exhibition SALVIFICA. Sassoferrato and Giovanni Manfredini, Between Skin and Deep, curated by Federica Facchini and Massimo Pulini, open from Oct. 11, 2024 to Jan. 26, 2025. A monographic exhibition of contemporary artist Giovanni Manfredini (Pavullo nel Frignano, Modena, Italy, 1963) in dialogue with eight previously unpublished paintings by seventeenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Salvi known as “Sassoferrato” and two by Alessandro Mattia da Farnese, from the collecting and antiquarian world. The latter’s two paintings (Madonna and Child with Child in her arms and St. John and Baptism of Christ, both from private collections) confirm a close kinship with Sassoferrato’s style and open up new developments of study, delineating with great probability that Sassoferrato’s workshop was not as monolithic as it was believed, continuing only with his sons, but had other contacts and collaborations of a high level.

This edition concludes a three-year period conceived as a double research project, on the ancient and the contemporary through a comparison of the works of two artists. Starting from the profound understanding of what was, in the midst of the Baroque era, the aesthetic position of Sassoferrato, who distinguished himself for a pictorial research oriented to the recovery of Renaissance values, placing himself in the opposite direction to the trends of his time, the curators reiterated the ideal creative parallel grafted in these last two years, with the works and research of Nicola Samorì and Ettore Frani. On the contrary, Sassoferrato, only seemingly always the same, is an artist who precisely in these last decades of study has offered continuous and important surprises, as well as achieving higher and higher results in international auctions.

This year the dialogue will be with the works of Giovanni Manfredini, who lives and works between Modena and Milan. They will be installed in the spaces of Palazzo degli Scalzi and extraordinarily in those of the Church of San Michele Arcangelo.

Giovanni Manfredini’s art focuses its research on the body, its sacredness and the salvific and pacifying light that redeems its materiality. Combining performance and existentialism with explicit references to sacred art, his works arise from the contact of his own body on a surface treated with carbon black veils capable of registering its mark. Body parts materialize spectrally from darkness: it is hands, shoulders and arms, legs, fragments of the chest that break through a dark layer of the painting and reveal themselves luminously. The slow paint work that follows further increases the sculptural dimension of the figures, distancing them from their original performative expressiveness. Manfredini has been working on the body for years with slow research that has taken his work from the “attempts at existence” of the early period to an increasingly self-conscious pictorial statement in which light, pure and absolute, defines ecstatic and spiritual images that evoke seventeenth-century painting.

There is nothing narrative in Giovanni Manfredini’s works. What is revealed calls to mind expressive forms close to a sacred matrix iconography, images of martyrdom, of pain.

Hours Palazzo degli Scalzi: Friday from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Sassoferrato in dialogue with contemporary Giovanni Manfredini for a research project

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