Schirolli's House

This beautiful portrait of Vincenzo I, Duke of Mantua, can easily be ascribed to the circle of Frans Pourbus the Younger. The artist, son of Frans the Elder, was appreciated throughout Europe for his ability to paint lifelike faces of the greats of the time. He moved to Mantua after 1599, just following the Duke, whom he had met in Brussels. In the ten years he spent at the Gonzaga court he was active alongside Rubens, although the two careers did not influence each other. The rather wooden ways of the painting presented here, however, prevent it from being directly attributed to the master. Vincenzo still looks realatively young while he is wearing the emblem of the Golden Fleece, the highest imperial honor, a legacy of Burgundian descent, granted only to a few illustrious men of the time. As is known, this privilege had no perpetual value, nor could it be handed down, but had to be returned after the death of the beneficiary to the only legitimate owner, or the Emperor. As for Vincent, the golden fleece was granted to him in 1589.

This delicate portrait is not by a certain author, nor is the identity of the portrayed character evident. The incisive and subtly evocative way of recreating the face and pose recalls the hand of Sofonisba Anguissola, an excellent painter who for a long time gravitated, for a part of her life, in the orbit of the Spanish court, before marrying in Palermo and then returning to Northern Italy. In any case, the child who shows us part of his face here has eyes full of suffused melancholy. Although the dress is already in the seventeenth-century style, the general attitude is more of the sixteenth century, precisely because the pensiveness of the protagonist steals space from the description of the splendor of his social position. His agnificent pinkish lips seem to tighten slightly to indicate a movement of reluctance or perennial inner reflection.

Vedova is a great master of Italian abstractionism. His personal sensitivity actually derives from the great history of Venetian art, particularly from the eighteenth century, but his expressive temperament challenges European and American artists. He explores the vicissitudes of matter and color, in paintings in which he loves to contrast different colors, yet remaining rigorous and almost maniacal. In this stupendous work we see the conflict between black and white, following a brushstroke of excruciating power, which seems to describe skeletons and carcasses, almost composing a Guernica updated for the fifties. Vedova therefore overcomes the limits of abstract expressionism by transforming the act of the brush into current art. To do this, he needs all the wisdom of a Venice reinvented and bestowed on him through his thoughts. Truly and honestly, the artist builds his own universe. Thus, thanks to its disruptive energy, he projects itself into our imagination.

A big eye is watching us. Indeed, this is not true either. It is an egg, an empty embryo, but jagged inside. It is the world, precisely, as the title states. Pizzi Cannella often performs artistic operations that live on the vague yet fascinating border between the abstract and the figurative. This evidently happens because he believes that the universe around us continually generates details that often do not reach our senses completely, but nevertheless remain within a fruitful unconsciousness. His mastery, moreover, leads to a refined synthesis between the sign, a tormented but happy handwriting, and the overall impact of the work. That is, the creations of Pizzi Cannella can be seen from different points of height. Approaching and moving away reveal surprising details, which hatch and accumulate in the perception of those attending an ultra-natural show.

Also Marco Tirelli belongs to the so-called New Roman School. His artistic research moves towards a continuous rarefaction of the work as such, following geometric games of false perspectives in space and preferring colors of elusive visual impact. But at the beginning of this adventure the artist, still in his twenties, was exhibited at the 1982 Venice Biennale with three paintings, one of which is the one shown here. It is a universe of signs that impact on matter, demonstrating evident influences by, for example, Antoni Tàpies. Here, however, the large dimensions of the work allow us to visualize a nascent conflict of figures in the larval state. Almost graffiti of an archaic civilization, yet exposed to the precariousness of the contemporary, the shapes suspended above a desert or on a cliff strike us with their evident effectiveness of symbols whose profound significance has been lost.