PIRANESI | BASILICO. Vedute di Roma
23 marzo - 23 giugno 2024

The exhibition celebrates the charm of the Eternal City by comparing the ancient visions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings and the contemporary city portrayed in Gabriele Basilico's photographs.

 

Views of Rome, the title of the collection of etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Venice, 1720 - Rome, 1778), is also the title of the photographic reportage made by Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 1944-2013) for the Swiss magazine "DU" in 1989.

This assignment was followed by others that periodically led the photographer to confront the chaotic spaces of a city where ancient and contemporary coexist, giving rise to strong contrasts, cross-references and visual reciprocities that photography sometimes struggles to read and record.

In 2010, the Cini Foundation in Venice commissioned him to reread Piranesi's 18th-century Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) in the metropolitan city facing the dawn of the third millennium. And it is from this project that the idea for the exhibition in Lonato del Garda originated, born from the collaboration between the Ugo Da Como Foundation and the Gabriele Basilico Archive.

 

Since 2011, the Library of the Ugo Da Como Foundation has held the extraordinary collection of Cav. Luigi Nocivelli (1930-2006), a Brescian entrepreneur who, in the last ten years of his life, turned the enthusiasm and determination that characterised his intense entrepreneurial activity to bibliophilia. His technical and scientific training led him to favour illustrated treatises on architecture, and he attended the international antiquarian market, which favoured the constitution of an extraordinary collection including more than four hundred volumes printed between the 15th and 20th centuries, including five editions of Piranesi's works that also include the collection of the great Vedute di Roma that the Venetian engraver printed from 1748 onwards.

The exhibition, a true visual interpretation of the urban poetry of Rome, proposes a continuous dialogue between the ancient engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the contemporary photography of Gabriele Basilico, revealing to the public a selection of 32 views to which are added two large-scale photographs, the interior of the Colosseum and the view of the Arch of Septimius Severus with the pronaos of the Temple of Saturn, and the extraordinary specimen of the Campus Martius by Piranesi (1762), preserved in the Nocivelli Collection.

 

"To the idea of magnificence, to the fervour and passion for Roman architecture celebrated in Piranesi's etchings, Basilico contrasts a lucid respect for the monument itself, treating it like a Shanghai skyscraper or Berlin architecture. He orders the vestiges of the past in the space in which they have been placed for centuries, in a time that would seem even more suspended than in the 18th-century etchings by the Venetian artist were it not for the people who sometimes inhabit the photographs. [...] In the absence of reinforced concrete, metal, shiny and reflective surfaces, the founding elements of contemporary architecture - the natural territory and authentic obsessions exhaustively explored in his artistic practice - Basilico affirms in his images inspired by Piranesi's plates the resilience of the temples, arches and palaces of ancient Rome, the stubborn resistance of marble to the centuries that follow one another, the austere silence that they still effuse today".

 

The exhibition aims to raise awareness of the extraordinary library housed in the Casa del Podestà of the Fondazione Ugo Da Como, one of the most important private collections in Italy, and the work of Gabriele Basilico, one of the world's best-known photographers of urban landscapes, to whom Milan has also recently dedicated an important monographic exhibition set up between the Palazzo Reale and the Triennale.

 

The catalogue published by SKIRA is edited by Filippo Maggia.

 

Cost of admission ticket:

5 euros for the exhibition only and the free visit of the Rocca

10 euros for visiting the entire monumental complex of the Ugo Da Como Foundation (Rocca and Casa del Podestà)