Sgarbi attacks Ferrara: "Dead city." The alderman: "he likes it only when it hosts his events."

Back-and-forth in the last few hours between art historian Vittorio Sgarbi and the councillor for culture of the Municipality of Ferrara, Massimo Maisto. Object of contention: the liveliness of the Este city, targeted by Sgarbi, who, moreover, is actually a native of Ferrara. Recalling the anniversary of the death of Giorgio De Chirico (which occurred in 1978), an artist who became inextricably linked to Ferrara even though he stayed there for a short period of his life (he considered it a metaphysical city and was strongly attracted by its atmospheres, which ended up inspiring many masterpieces for him), Sgarbi told Corriere di Bologna that “Ferrara at those dates, before de Chirico’s arrival, is a dead, petrified city, which since becoming peripheral to the Papal States has been constantly lost in the fog of the Po Valley. When de Chirico met at the Military Hospital in Ferrara with Carrà, and then with Morandi and De Pisis, they began to ’feel’ the city. What happened with them is that they brought Ferrara more than Turin to be on the contemporary scene, the facade of the Castello Estense and the architecture became the subject, the true protagonists of art. It was a short-lived moment, because after the end of the war de Chirico left. ”. Immediately after, the attack on today’s Ferrara: “Ferrara has fallen back into its lethargy, and still sleeps like a Pompeii at night. Not a single painting from de Chirico’s metaphysical period can be found in Ferrara’s museums, and it will be good for the city to try to have masterpieces that it does not have.”

Massimo Maisto, however, does not stand for this and recalled how two years ago an exhibition was held at Palazzo dei Diamanti, which, the councilor stressed, “according to all the experts, was truly resounding with a success with the public far exceeding expectations. An exhibition where the greatest masterpieces of Metaphysics that are scattered in museums all over the world were collected. And which for this very reason unfortunately cannot be in Ferrara, except on the occasion of an exhibition.” The exhibition Maisto refers to is De Chirico in Ferrara. Metaphysics and the Avant-Garde, held at the Palazzo dei Diamanti from November 14, 2015 to February 28, 2016. And then the lunge: “Vittorio Sgarbi speaks positively about Ferrara only when it hosts his initiatives, such as the Cavallini Sgarbi collection exhibition that closed on September 20.”

However, this is not the first time Sgarbi has lashed out at his city’s institutions. It was December 2014, Sgarbi was in Ferrara to present his book L’Italia delle meraviglie, and at the Pinacoteca Nazionale the important exhibition Lampi sublimi a Ferrara tra Michelangelo e Tiziano was underway. Bastianino and the San Paolo Worksite, dedicated to the figure of Sebastiano Filippi known as Bastianino, one of the greatest painters of 16th-century Ferrara. According to Sgarbi, the exhibition was useless and the museum was not doing enough to promote itself: hence the attack on the then last three directors of the Ferrara museum (Anna Stanzani, Grazia Agostini and Luisa Ciammitti), called by Sgarbi “three gleeful geese who ruined the National Picture Gallery of Ferrara.” However, the Pinacoteca was in difficult economic conditions at the time, and still managed to put on a useful exhibition (works that were no longer visible after the 2012 earthquake were also on display), and most importantly, as the then director Anna Stanzani pointed out in the reply entrusted to the columns of La Nuova Ferrara, the museum in recent managements had managed to enrich itself continuously, seeing “a continuous growth in quality and quantity of the works kept in the Pinacoteca (by purchase, donation, deposit, or payment of inheritance taxes) and a continuous deepening of the collections thanks to exhibitions and initiatives,” all thanks to the work of all the Pinacoteca staff. But Sgarbi had also attacked the city, recalling that he had proposed to grant his paintings and collection for the Castello Estense (then actually granted, but only this year, for an exhibition), and having received a negative response: thus, the well-known figure wondered if Ferrara should not "die under incapable administrators."

Sgarbi attacks Ferrara: "Dead city." The alderman: "he likes it only when it hosts his events."

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