Fragments - Finestre sull'Arte

Why is there a bear chained to the palace of a Renaissance city?

A chained bear, tied to the facade of an elegant marble building. Standing upright on its hind legs, aggressive, in the act of attacking. The snout of the animal that is unhappy with that condition, with the chain that holds him there, attached to th...
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La femme de Claude, Francesco Mosso's masterpiece: a 19th century feminicide

Immense was the dismay caused, in August 1877, by the news of the death of Francesco Mosso, a talented painter from Turin who had passed away at the age of only twenty-nine. The tone of the obituaries was always the same: who knows what he would have...
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The armless beauty: on the Madonna of Camaiore, a mysterious work by Matteo Civitali

Perhaps the most suitable nickname for Matteo Civitali'sAnnunciata was found by Carlo Pedretti: in 1998 he compared some sheets by Leonardo da Vinci with the sweet little Renaissance Madonnina by the great sculptor from Lucca, and called her "the mai...
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A nativity scene painted on pottery: the 16th-century altarpiece in the church of Albissola Marina

In the church of Albissola Marina, the parish church of Our Lady of Concord, there is a beautiful painted nativity scene, from the 16th century, placed near the altar. And so far so good: there are countless churches that at some point present the fa...
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Is the great Pan dead? The death of Eros, the spectacular new work by Bertozzi & Casoni.

"When you are in Palodes, announce that the Great Pan is dead." A voice rises from the island of Paxos that stuns all the passengers on the ship: it is directed to Thamus, the Egyptian helmsman. On the ship people wonder if they should disregard the ...
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The sensual and ambiguous love between the merman and the Nereid. Max Klinger's masterpiece

Rarely do we find, in mid-nineteenth-century painting, paintings imbued with an immediate, almost shameless eroticism, such as that which permeates Max Klinger's Triton and Nereid , the German artist's most famous painting, a work that still manages ...
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An altarpiece for the duke's sister: St. Margaret presented at Trinity by Anton Maria Viani

Antonio Maria Viani was the prefect of the ducal factories in Mantua when his colleague Domenico Fetti portrayed him, in 1618, in a large canvas that was part of a cycle devoted to the life of Margherita Gonzaga, sister of Duke Vincenzo I: the noblew...
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An anonymous summit of the Renaissance in Liguria: the table of the Master of Cesio

Writing about the Cesio panel, an extravagant apex of the Renaissance in Liguria, now preserved in the highly prized Diocesan Museum in Albenga, art historian Mauro Natale had spoken of an "absolute exception": it was not in fact customary for such a...
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