photo by / foto di Raffaele Cipolletta
Giotto. Italy In Milan, at Palazzo Reale, fourteen works autographed by the enfant prodige pupil of Cimabue. For this exhibition, architect Mario Bellini conceived a textbook exhibition design
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n Milan, at Palazzo Reale, fourteen autographed works by Giotto, the enfant prodige and pupil of Cimabue who has outstripped the master, are on display. Celebrated by Dante (Purgatorio, Canto XI), and a legend for children usually accustomed to seeing him immortalized on boxes of crayons, while painting on a stone under Cimabue’s watchful and admiring gaze,
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LUCE 315 / L’ITALIA DEL MONDO
Giotto is an innovator because he has shelved the courtly language of the gothic painting, opening the way to Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. His Madonnas are recognisable for their more naturalistic faces, and their almost earthly physicality. As if carved with painting, one feels the weight of their body within a real space. The exhibition “Giotto, l’Italia” is not to be missed, for with the famous frescoes, altarpieces, and memorable crucifixes, the several stages of the artist’s brilliant career are retraced. Giotto is the father of the Italian figurative tradition, with angels and Christs with human faces, freed from the aura of the static Byzantine sacred icon, with expressions “of attitudes and emotions”, as written by Vasari, his earliest biographer. Demanded in Rome, Padua, Verona, Naples, and Avignon, Giotto is the first painter, entrepreneur, traveller, rich, and successful, able to start several works along, thanks to his talent and to his skilled assistants. Giotto came to Milan between 1335 and 1336, on the invitation of Azzone Visconti, who commissioned frescoes, profane cycles now irretrievably lost, for his palace, now the Palazzo Reale. Here he “comes back” with
masterpieces, mainly on wood, brought together for the first time, each of which illustrates not only his career, but also the evolution of the Italian painting. From the fragment of the Maestà della Vergine from Borgo San Lorenzo and the Madonna da San Giorgio alla Costa – both documenting the beginning of the young Giotto, then working from Florence to Assisi –, up to the longed for Polittico Stefaneschi, executed in Rome for the Old St. Peter’s Basilica, when the painter was already famous, and for the first time on display outside the Vatican Museums. Sublime is the display of the fragment, never exhibited before, frescoed with two heads of the apostles or saints, portrayed one full-face and the other one three-quarter view. Along with other works from the Uffizi, the Pinacoteca of Bologna, and the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce, the Cuspide con Dio Padre e angeli is breathtaking. Part of the collections of the San Diego Museum of Art, in California, this piece of the Polittico Baroncelli is amazing for its illusionistic spatial structure. The exhibition, promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MiBACT) and the