Riace Bronzes enhancement, controversy between Sgarbi and the Committee for the Bronzes

Around the issue of the valorization of the Riace Bronzes, a controversy has flared up, with art historian Vittorio Sgarbi on one side and rheumatology doctor Eduardo Lamberti-Castronovo, a member of the Committee for the Protection and Valorization of the Riace Bronzes, based in Reggio Calabria, on the other. The clash arose at an event held last Aug. 14 in Pietrasanta to honor the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Bronzes: Entitled Rewind, the initiative, promoted by the Massimo Del Chiaro Art Foundry in Pietrasanta, with the sponsorship of the Versilia municipality and the Region of Tuscany, took place with the sinking, in the seabed near the pier in Marina di Pietrasanta, of reproductions of the Riace Bronzes made between 1990 and 1995 by the Foundry. This will be a true underwater exhibition that will last for a year, with the idea of reproducing the link between sea and bronze that has contributed to the two sculptures’ appeal. Until next year, the two reproductions will be monitored with a webcam that will return images of the changes occurring and the impact of the sea on the bronze.

Against the initiative had already thundered, in the previous days, the same Committee, which in a note signed by its members Lamberti-Castronovo, Pasquale Amato and Francesco Alì had rejected Rewind without appeal, speaking of “a ridiculous idea” and judging the suggestion of wanting to monitor the interaction between water and bronze on the Tyrrhenian seabed as vague. “We are sorry,” they wrote, “that the organizers should waste economic resources and time trying to discover results already acquired by the Ministry, which, since the Bronzes were found, has already carried out three restorations (the second and third of which were in Reggio) with which it has also tried to remedy the damage caused by corrosive agents and oxidation caused by so many years at the bottom of the sea. If the organizers of this useless initiative had informed themselves they would have avoided making a bad impression.” The committee also considered the operation “not only ridiculous but also insulting to the efforts of scholars who have spent 50 years of restoration and research. It is also misleading and damaging to the image of the two absolute masterpieces of the fifth century B.C. in the world. Finally, it damages the primacy of Italy as the home of the most relevant artistic and cultural heritage in the world.” Finally, Amato, Alì and Lamberti-Castronovo wrote, “If we really want to spread the knowledge of the two masterpieces to the best of our ability, we invite the Ministry, the Region and the Metropolitan City to invest resources to organize special flights and trains to allow Italian and foreign visitors to come to Reggio Calabria to admire the harmonious artistic perfection and the bewitching beauty of the original statues. Works that are world excellencies and identifiable and immovable assets of the Archaeological Museum of Magna Graecia in Reggio Calabria.”

The retort of Sgarbi, who spoke to hold the Rewind event, took place on the same day as the sinking of the two reproductions, and directly on the pier in Marina di Pietrasanta, at the microphones of local television stations, focusing mainly on the issue of theimmovability of the Riace bronzes: “Calabria,” he said, “has moved in a very discontinuous way. The problem is to have a rational attitude. Who established the grotesque theory that the bronze is thin and cannot move? The amount of lies that have been told not to move them represents perhaps the concern of the Calabrians that, as Calabria is a region that has been much abused, they will take the Bronzes away from them forever. Project that by the way would not be without foundation if we thought of sending them to Rome, but the law provides that the found works stay in the region and in the museum where they were recovered, so this can be understood. However, this ban on moving them I have always found senseless. Fragility is of humans, the sculptures are not fragile, and today we have all the tools to make them move. It is absolute baloney that they are fragile. They can be moved, and it should be done judiciously: sending them, with times of course not too frequent, every five years, to a big capital, like Paris or New York, would be a right thing. The idea that they stay in a museum in Reggio Calabria is a real measure of seizure. I understand that these words of mine may generate a controversy, which is not so much against the director of the museum who is my friend, but it is against these committees of lying big wigs who tell that they are fragile. But fragile where? They are not fragile at all, they can safely move, this has to be said by a committee that has the will to tell the truth.”

Continuing the controversy was, in the days after the event, Lamberti-Castronovo alone: “That of Sgarbi, who calls the operation of Marina di Pietrasanta intelligent, is an offense to logic, to the city of Reggio, to the museum and its director, who does not deserve it. And above all, to the intelligence of everyone,” he said. “The operation hatched by a number of ’art dealers’ is all too obvious: to appropriate our Bronzes to make them wander around the world, in the face of the Calabrians. Sgarbi indulges in statements not only laughable, but destitute of any technical foundation. He insists that the Bronzes would be seized in the Museum of Reggio Calabria and that, even, they should always be exhibited in the capital of Italy. Not only that, but they should be traveling salesmen of Italian art and culture, transported to every part of the world. The Vittorio ignores or pretends to ignore two things: the first is that the Bronzes are masterfully displayed in the Magna Graecia Museum in Reggio, free to be admired by every citizen of the world, at an almost ridiculous symbolic cost. The second is that the Ministry-appointed National Scientific Committee has already made a clear statement about the absolute immovability of the Bronzes from where they are. Why insist on it then? Because it makes a scene. And because marauding over a spineless city is easy and I would even say profitable. We demand to know how much the great expert was paid for traveling to Versilia to act as godfather to nothing. Two copies submerged in the sea to study what? Well, maybe in 2,500 years we will know. Dear Sgarbi, it is not the Bronzes that have to wander, but they are here in Reggio waiting for millions of visitors from all parts of the world.”

Prompt came Sgarbi’s rejoinder, entrusted to a video posted on Facebook: “Appearing out of nowhere is an abusive person, a certain Lamberti-Castronovo, who is part of a committee, which evidently had the function of expressing an advisory opinion, which has appropriated this commitment as if it were a committee that prepares a law and has it voted on by Parliament. This committee offends a noble enterprise of a great company, a foundry that must be respected. The Bronzes are in no way more fragile than all works of art, which may be mostly immovable or appurtenant, just as each museum designates its own, and yet for special reasons, every ten years, they may have an exemption to be exhibited. That’s what I was asking for the Expo, or for the Metropolitan or for Japan, and I imagine that the next government will address this issue and avoid giving an overpowering status to a committee like yours. The operation is nothing but a tribute to the Bronzes and the symbolic idea of returning them to the water through the beautiful castings of a great foundry, the Del Chiaro Foundry: art dealers have nothing to do with it, they are extraordinary foundrymen who had the clever idea of returning to the water what the water gave us. What could we say then about Christo covering the monuments, would that disgust you fake academics? The Bronzes should not be the traveling salesmen of art-I’m just saying that if the Metropolitan were to guarantee 10 million as fees, and 10 million from visitor tickets, it might also be a worthwhile thing for the museum and for the maintenance of the institution. Every five or ten years they could go to New York, Tokyo, Beijing, between November and January, when nobody goes to Reggio Calabria.”

Lamberti-Castronovo’s response came via another note: “The Guru of Italian culture, ubiquitous on local and national TV [...] this time he was caught with his hands in the cookie jar. And he reacts like those children who, having lost the battle with contending peers, having no other footholds, resort to insults, involving mothers and sisters of the unfortunate. Similarly, the Ferrara-born Sgarbi, never was his surname so onomatopoeic, indulges in a series of gratuitous insults dedicated to the writer and the Committee for the Defense of the Riace Bronzes.” The Pietrasanta initiative, the Committee member said, was not criticized as such: it was criticized for “the unacceptable assumption that a cultural operation of such depth was being carried out that it deserved as a godfather, a qualified exponent with a high-sounding name. Not only that. But even more unacceptable is the colossal lie, according to which, it would be the launching of a study to evaluate the reactions of the bronze, after a year of marine immersion. But can one really think that the Italians, and for them the Calabrians, are fools? Let us not spend words to explain the irrationality and non-scientificity of the assumption, let us emphasize the circumstance that it has been declaimed and disseminated to justify and upgrade something that, in fact, is just a publicity stunt, to tell the truth, of low quality. Legitimate but distorted in substance. Copies of the Mona Lisa exist by the thousands, but we are not aware that the champion of turpitude, in pomp and circumstance, has ever attended an opening of the exhibition of a fake. Much less, has he proposed the relocation of Leonardo’s masterpiece to another location, perennially.” On the other hand, as for the possibility of moving the Riace Bronzes, Lamberti-Castronovo said that “It is not provincialism that of the Committee and the majority of the people of Reggio, but only an extreme desire to keep and defend what history has assigned to us, to foster a legitimate recovery of a generous, but unfortunate and despoiled Land.”

The last word for the moment is Sgarbi’s: “One can assess that for political and even tourist expediency they should not move, but to establish that they cannot move one must call in real restorers and people who do not play politics over the Bronzes. It is an assessment of expediency, exquisitely related to the assessment of a director and the ministry.” One cannot reduce the Riace bronzes, Sgarbi says, to “young people who have to stay locked in their houses after seven o’clock at night because their parents don’t want them to be in danger, or two who have taken citizenship income and have to stay there at the expense of the state instead of bringing to the state every five or 10 years ten or 12 million through exhibitions in great capitals of the world who know the greatness of Calabria, and its not being a place of trafficking, intrigue and ’ndrangheta, as it is known, through the absolute beauty of the Bronzes. That absolute image is a grace for Calabria, otherwise plagued by trafficking, politicians doing favors, and ’ndrangheta.”

Riace Bronzes enhancement, controversy between Sgarbi and the Committee for the Bronzes

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