It is not merely a showcase of famous works, but a broad reading of his visual language, capable of highlighting the tension between document and construction, between observation and invention, between everyday chronicle and universal vision. In this sense, the exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to engage with an artist who transformed streets, anonymous faces, marginal gestures, and urban spaces into material for a visual narrative that remains extraordinarily relevant today.

Robert Doisneau and humanist photography of the twentieth century

A gaze that transforms the everyday into narrative

Robert Doisneau occupies a central position in the history of twentieth-century photography and, in particular, in the definition of so-called French humanist photography. Born in Gentilly in 1912, the artist developed a visual language grounded in a radical proximity to ordinary experience: street life, work rhythms, children’s games, and the small rituals of urban affection.

In his iconographic universe, nothing is monumental or celebratory: his attention is instead focused on what appears marginal, transient, almost invisible. It is precisely in this choice that his greatness lies. For Doisneau, photography is not the realm of the exceptional, but the device through which the ordinary reveals its narrative density.

His images do not merely record reality. They construct a vision of the world in which the human returns to the center with a force free of rhetoric. Stolen kisses, running children, workers on break, café patrons, passersby caught in sudden suspension: everything contributes to defining a poetics of proximity, in which photography becomes a tool of participatory observation and sensitive interpretation. In this sense, Doisneau is not merely a chronicler of Parisian life, but an author capable of transforming the modern city into a repertoire of relationships, encounters, and micro-stories.

The human dimension at the center of the image

The distinctive trait of his research is the constant centrality of the human figure. Even when urban architecture or collective scenes take on a significant role, the image always retains an emotional center linked to gesture, gaze, and posture. His is not sociology in a strict sense, nor mere documentation of customs. Rather, it stages a humanity observed with irony, empathy, and precision, avoiding both sentimentalism and explicit judgment.

Paris as a moral and visual landscape

The city of Paris constitutes the privileged stage of this vision. However, Doisneau’s Paris does not coincide with the postcard imagery of monuments or the tourist geography of the French capital. It is a lateral city, made of sidewalks, suburbs, cafés, courtyards, schools, workshops, and markets. An urban fabric lived from within, in which photography records the minimal energy of social life. The street thus becomes a space of spontaneous theater, but also a compositional structure through which the artist organizes relationships between bodies, objects, movement, and depth.

Between document, direction, and image construction

One of the most interesting aspects of Doisneau’s poetics concerns the never fully resolved relationship between spontaneity and construction. The popular success of his images has often fueled the idea of a photography entirely entrusted to chance and the speed of the instant. In reality, a significant part of his work reveals discreet direction, staging, and conscious compositional planning. This does not diminish the truth of the images; on the contrary, it clarifies their deeper nature. Doisneau’s photography does not coincide with a neutral transcription of reality, but with its poetic interpretation.

The emblematic case of Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville clearly shows how his work moves along the boundary between document and invention. Yet the strength of that image, as of many others, Un chien à roulettes, La concierge aux lunettes, L’information scolaire, lies not in chance. Together, these images build a coherent repertoire that reflects his interest in ordinary life, observed with participation but without emphasis. They represent recurring typologies of his work: everyday irony, attention to marginal or anonymous figures, and observation of social contexts.

The expression “contribute to telling the story of a photographer” suggests that these are not merely individual works, but fragments of a broader narrative: that of his artistic research. Photography thus becomes a means through which a visual biography is constructed, made not of exceptional events but of minimal and repeated situations.

It does not lie in the illusion of absolute spontaneity, but in the ability to make what is carefully constructed appear natural. Doisneau manages to integrate direction into the flow of urban life, making the image credible, open, and narrative.

Poetic realism as a stylistic hallmark

For this reason, his language has often been associated with poetic realism. This definition is particularly effective, as it captures the dual nature of his photography: on the one hand, fidelity to the real world; on the other, the ability to transform it without distorting it. His images are never purely illustrative, yet neither are they abstract or self-referential. They remain anchored in concrete experience, while constantly opening toward a surplus of meaning belonging to memory, emotion, and imagination.

Doisneau’s poetics between city, childhood, and social life

A photography of proximity

The exhibition clearly highlights the major thematic cores that run through Doisneau’s work and define its historical significance. At the center emerges a photography of proximity, in which the subject is never distant, hierarchically separated, or reduced to a mere object of observation. The figures in his images seem to belong to the same ethical and human horizon as the author: they are approached with a measure that avoids both pity and emphasis.

This proximity produces a particular narrative quality. The viewer is not confronted with a closed scene, exhausted within its surface, but with a fragment of experience that suggests a before and an after, a broader context, a barely glimpsed intertwining of lives. From this derives the extraordinary accessibility of Doisneau’s photography: the images are immediate, but not simplified; welcoming, but never naïve.

Childhood as a space of freedom

Among the most recurring themes is childhood, observed as a privileged space of invention, play, and disobedience to conventions. Doisneau’s children are not decorative presences nor generic allegories of innocence. They are active subjects, full of energy, capable of disrupting the order of urban space with their unpredictability. In them, the photographer recognizes a form of original freedom, a practical and bodily intelligence that resists the disciplinary structures of the adult world.

Work and the dignity of the everyday

Alongside childhood, another major theme is work. Workers, craftsmen, employees, and residents of working-class neighborhoods form an essential constellation of his vision. Doisneau does not idealize labor, but restores its human and social value. The images devoted to this sphere show attention to bodies, repeated gestures, and the materiality of productive environments. In them, one recognizes a form of respect that coincides with the rejection of spectacular hierarchy: everyday labor becomes worthy of representation not for its exceptionality, but for its reality.

Affections, encounters, and relationships in public space

The affective dimension constitutes another fundamental axis. Kisses, glances, waiting, complicity, episodes of tenderness or ironic courtship run through his work and define its emotional temperature. In these cases, what interests Doisneau is not the celebration of love as an abstract theme, but its appearance in public space, its inscription within the life of the city. Relationships thus become a form of symbolic occupation of urban space, a way in which the private becomes visible without losing intimacy.

Why Doisneau still speaks to the present

One of the exhibition’s main merits lies in demonstrating how Doisneau’s photography does not belong solely to the visual memory of the twentieth century, but retains a strong ability to address the present. In an era dominated by the proliferation of images and the speed of visual consumption, his work reminds us of the value of duration, waiting, and conscious composition. His gaze invites us to consider photography not as an automatic gesture, but as a form of attention to the world.

This relevance does not derive solely from the iconic beauty of certain images, but from the quality of the relationship they establish with the viewer. Doisneau remains contemporary because he forces us to slow down, to read details, to recognize the cultural significance of what we often consider negligible. His photography restores depth to common experience and, precisely for this reason, stands in opposition to the superficiality of instantaneous vision.

The exhibition path

A retrospective constructed as a narrative

The exhibition path of “Robert Doisneau” is conceived as a true visual narrative. The display does not merely line up famous works, but constructs a progressive reading of his research, placing iconic shots and lesser-known photographs in dialogue. This choice is particularly effective, as it avoids reducing the artist to a repertoire of icons and instead allows for an understanding of his linguistic complexity.

The presence of over 140 photographs makes it possible to convey the breadth of his production and to follow the evolution of a visual method that is consistently coherent yet capable of renewal. The visitor thus moves through an emotional and social geography centered on twentieth-century France, while opening onto a broader reflection on the image as a form of knowledge.

The function of iconic images

Within the exhibition, the most famous photographs do not serve a merely attractive role. They act as nodes of recognition, entry points into a complex poetics. Their familiarity to the general public allows immediate access to Doisneau’s universe, but the exhibition context rescues them from trivialization and restores their formal, historical, and symbolic density.

Rediscovering lesser-known works

The comparison with lesser-known images proves crucial. Here, the consistency of his gaze, the variety of registers, and the ability to balance humor, melancholy, social observation, and compositional precision emerge most clearly. These works do not appear marginal to the iconic ones, but expand their meaning, showing how the entire body of work is shaped by the same idea of photography.

Thematic sections and the readability of the exhibition path

The thematic structure encourages an experience that is both orderly and layered at the same time. Visitors can clearly recognize the major fields of Doisneau’s research, the city, childhood, work, affection, everyday life, without the exhibition path losing its fluidity. This organization responds effectively both to the needs of a general audience and to those of visitors who wish to read the exhibition from a historical-critical perspective.

The narrative character of the installation also makes it possible to grasp how each photograph does not exist in isolation, but enters into relationship with the others through analogies, contrasts, recurring themes, and recurring visual structures. In this way, the retrospective functions as an interpretative device capable of making the lines of force of the artist’s work clearly visible.

An accessible exhibition path without renouncing complexity

One of the project’s most successful aspects is its balance between accessibility and rigor. The exhibition does not simplify the artist, but makes him legible. The clarity of the exhibition narrative does not diminish the complexity of the works; on the contrary, it enhances it, offering visitors the necessary tools to understand the relationship between Doisneau’s fame and the depth of his visual language.

Doisneau’s style: composition, black and white, narrative time

The rigorous construction of apparently simple images

One of the aspects that the exhibition makes it possible to appreciate with particular clarity is the formal quality of Doisneau’s photography. Behind the immediacy of his images there is in fact a rigorous visual construction, based on extremely careful control of space, the relationships between figures, lines of force, and the internal rhythm of the composition. Nothing appears accidental, even when the scene suggests spontaneity. Every element seems placed at the exact point where it can produce the greatest balance between readability and narrative openness.

The city as a compositional structure

In urban photographs, pavements, façades, windows, café tables, signs, and the trajectories of passers-by do not constitute mere environmental elements, but true components of visual syntax. Urban space is organized in such a way as to guide the gaze, create depth, define relationships between foreground and background, and place stillness and movement in tension. Paris is therefore not only a subject, but also a compositional principle.

Black and white as a linguistic choice

Doisneau’s black and white should not be understood as a simple technical feature or as nostalgia for an era. It is a precise linguistic choice, one that strips away the superfluous and concentrates attention on the relationships between light, volume, expression, and gesture. The absence of color does not impoverish the scene, but intensifies its readability and emotional density. The contrasts are generally measured, free of excessive theatricality: light shapes without spectacularizing, reveals without invading.

Subtraction as a form of precision

This visual economy is an integral part of his poetics. By removing color, Doisneau concentrates the energy of the image on the encounter between bodies, objects, and spaces. The result is an essential yet never impoverished photography, capable of bringing out the tactile and temporal qualities of the scene with extraordinary subtlety.

The instant that opens onto a story

Doisneau’s images capture a precise moment, but they are never exhausted by the instant itself. In each photograph one senses the presence of a broader temporality: something has just happened or is about to happen, and the viewer is invited to imagine what follows. This narrative quality clearly distinguishes his work from purely descriptive photography. The shot is never an end in itself; it is the threshold of an implicit story.

The viewer’s participation

It is precisely this narrative openness that actively involves the viewer. Looking at a photograph by Doisneau means completing it mentally, projecting hypotheses, imagining voices, trajectories, and relationships. It is a photography that offers itself with immediacy, but asks to be inhabited with attention.

Why visit the exhibition

An important exhibition for those who follow photography in Rome

For the public interested in photography exhibitions in Rome, this retrospective represents an especially significant opportunity. Not only because of the artist’s fame, but because it makes it possible to observe at close range a body of works broad enough to restore the deep structure of his research. In an exhibition landscape often dominated by projects centered on a single iconic image or by overly simplified interpretative paths, this exhibition instead offers a solid, readable, and critically grounded perspective.

An essential artist for understanding visual modernity

Doisneau’s persistence in the contemporary imagination does not depend solely on the editorial fortune of his most famous photographs. It depends on the fact that his work helped define a modern idea of the image: no longer merely testimony, not only an aesthetic form, but a place of relationship between author, subject, and viewer. His photography remains fundamental for understanding how the twentieth century developed a new sensibility toward urban life, the crowd, and intimacy exposed within public space.

Photography as an exercise in attention

Ultimately, the exhibition is timely because it restores photography to its highest dimension: that of an exercise in attention. Attention to bodies, places, details, and the smallest moments of existence. In a present dominated by visual saturation, Doisneau’s work preserves the rare ability to teach us how to look. And it is probably in this, even more than in his fame, that the deeper reason lies for why this exhibition is worth visiting.

The project

The project stems from collaboration between Arthemisia, the Italian Ministry of Defense, the Italian Army, and Difesa Servizi. The exhibition is supported by the French Embassy in Italy, the Lazio Region, and the City of Rome, curated by Atelier Robert Doisneau and Gabriele Accornero, and produced by Arthemisia.

Developed in collaboration with Bridgeconsultingpro, the project is supported by Fondazione Terzo Pilastro Internazionale and Poema, with backing from Generali Italia as part of the Generali Valore Cultura program.

L'articolo The poetic gaze of Robert Doisneau in Roma proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Through an intense dialogue between archaic art, classical tradition, and modern experimentation, the exhibition highlights how Brâncuși developed a language capable of overcoming naturalistic representation in order to reach a universal dimension. From this perspective, the idea of infinity emerges as a generative principle of form, translating into structures that evoke continuity, rhythm, and transcendence.

The birth of an absolute language between the archaic and the classical

The theoretical core of the exhibition develops around the investigation of the archaic and classical roots of the language of Constantin Brâncuși, interpreted as the result of a complex cultural stratification. The artist does not merely reject nineteenth-century academicism, but constructs a formal system grounded in a profound dialogue with past civilizations. In this sense, the modernity of his work does not arise from a radical break, but from a refined operation of synthesis, in which elements from different historical and geographical contexts are reworked into a new linguistic unity.

The memory of archaic forms

One of the most relevant aspects highlighted by the exhibition is the relationship with archaic art, understood not as an iconographic repertoire to be cited, but as a system of visual thought based on essentiality. Brâncuși’s works show a surprising affinity with Cycladic sculpture, African productions, and the artistic expressions of primordial cultures, revealing a shared tension toward the reduction of form.

This relationship does not translate into a simple stylistic influence, but into a true structural consonance: as in archaic works, in Brâncuși’s sculpture form tends to free itself from contingency in order to assume a universal value. The exhibition emphasizes how this process is the result of a conscious reflection, leading the artist to identify in primitive forms an alternative model to Western naturalistic tradition.

The archetype as a structure of form

The notion of archetype plays a central role in Brâncuși’s research. His sculptures do not represent objects or recognizable figures in a strict sense, but evoke primary images belonging to a collective memory. The reduction to pure volumes and the simplification of lines eliminate every superfluous element, focusing attention on the essence of form.

This process implies a radical transformation of sculptural language: form is no longer the result of direct observation of reality, but the outcome of a mental construction aimed at grasping the universal idea of things. In this sense, the archetype becomes a generative structure, capable of organizing matter according to principles of balance and necessity.

The dialogue with the classical tradition

Alongside the archaic dimension, the exhibition highlights the confrontation with the classical world, which represents an essential reference for Brâncuși, albeit reinterpreted in a modern key. The artist looks to Greek sculpture not so much for its formal perfection, but for its ability to express an idea of harmony that transcends sensory data.

The classical tradition is thus reinterpreted through a process of progressive abstraction, in which the principles of proportion and balance are maintained, but freed from figurative representation. This dialogue allows Brâncuși to construct a language that combines rigor and freedom, order and innovation.

The synthesis between ideal and abstraction

The tension between classical ideal and modern abstraction constitutes one of the most interesting elements of Brâncuși’s research. His works do not renounce the harmonic dimension, but translate it into essential forms that escape any direct reference to reality.

In this sense, beauty is no longer linked to the representation of the human body, but becomes an intrinsic quality of form, determined by the relationship between its parts. Sculpture thus becomes an autonomous object, capable of expressing universal values through a rigorously controlled structure.

Infinity as a formal principle

The concept of infinity runs throughout the entire exhibition, emerging as a fundamental interpretative key to understanding Brâncuși’s research. Infinity is not understood in a purely philosophical sense, but as an operative principle guiding the construction of forms.

The exhibited works show how the artist uses repetition, modularity, and verticality to suggest an idea of endless continuity. Sculpture thus becomes a device capable of projecting itself beyond its physical limits, establishing a dialogue with the surrounding space.

Seriality and vertical tension

Seriality does not represent a simple repetition of a formal motif, but a method of investigation that allows the exploration of the potential of form. Each variation introduces a new interpretative possibility, contributing to the construction of an open system.

The vertical tension, often present in Brâncuși’s works, reinforces this idea of infinity, suggesting an ascending movement that surpasses the earthly dimension. In this way, sculpture becomes a bridge between matter and transcendence.

Constantin Brâncuși: a key figure in modern sculpture

Constantin Brâncuși occupies a pivotal position in the history of twentieth-century art, acting as a link between nineteenth-century sculptural tradition and the radical experiments of modernity. His research marks a decisive shift: sculpture is no longer understood as a representation of reality, but as an autonomous construction of essential forms capable of expressing universal content.

His contribution takes place within a historical context marked by profound cultural transformations, in which art is called upon to redefine its languages in relation to the changes of contemporary society. In this context, the Romanian artist develops a reflection that goes beyond both naturalism and purely decorative tendencies, placing the search for essence at the center of the creative process.

His work is distinguished by a constant tension toward simplification, understood not as an impoverishing reduction, but as a cognitive tool. Through rigorous work on form, Brâncuși comes to conceive sculpture as a self-sufficient entity, capable of establishing a direct dialogue with space and with the viewer.

A silent revolution

The transformation carried out by Brâncuși can be defined as a silent revolution, as it lacks sensational manifestations yet is deeply incisive at the linguistic level. Unlike other protagonists of the avant-garde, who express themselves through explicit ruptures and provocative gestures, Brâncuși constructs his path through a gradual redefinition of the very foundations of sculpture.

This revolution manifests itself in the progressive abandonment of every superfluous reference to visible reality, focusing instead on forms that tend toward the absolute. The artist does not destroy tradition, but critically traverses it, identifying within it elements that can be transformed and renewed.

The radical nature of his research lies precisely in this ability to carry out a profound transformation without resorting to explicit strategies of rupture. His works appear essential, almost inevitable, yet they are the result of a long and complex process based on continuous subtraction and refinement.

The centrality of the creative process

At the core of Brâncuși’s practice lies the creative process, understood as a path of progressive approximation to the essence of form. Each work does not represent a definitive endpoint, but a stage within an ongoing research.

The artist works in series, revisiting and reworking the same themes in successive variations, in a process aimed at exploring all the possibilities offered by a given formal configuration. This method highlights a conception of sculpture as a field of investigation, in which each solution remains open to further developments.

Repetition is therefore not a sign of staticity, but a dynamic tool through which form is continuously tested, refined, and brought toward a condition of ideal balance. Each work must be read as part of a broader trajectory, in which form is constantly re-elaborated. This process of refinement represents one of the most innovative aspects of his research.

Between spirituality and form

One of the deepest aspects of Brâncuși’s research is the connection between spirituality and form, which constitutes a key element in understanding the meaning of his work. Sculpture is not for him merely an aesthetic object, but a means through which to explore dimensions that transcend sensory reality.

This tension toward the transcendent translates into a search for pure forms capable of evoking meanings that go beyond their material presence. His works do not represent the visible world, but aim to express universal principles linked to the human condition and to the perception of time and space.

The spiritual dimension of his sculpture does not manifest itself through explicit iconographies, but through the construction of forms that suggest a higher order. In this sense, his work approaches an almost metaphysical conception of form, understood as the manifestation of an invisible principle.

The transcendence of matter

The relationship with matter assumes a fundamental meaning in this context. Brâncuși does not simply shape material, but transforms it in such a way as to transcend its physical dimension. The polished surface, the purity of lines, and the balance of proportions contribute to giving the works a quality that seems to go beyond their concrete nature.

Matter thus becomes a vehicle for a tension toward the immaterial, in which sculpture is configured as a meeting point between the visible and the invisible. This process implies a conception of artistic practice as a meditative act, in which every gesture is oriented toward the search for a higher harmony.

Light, reflecting on surfaces, amplifies this dimension, transforming the work into an object that continuously changes in relation to space and the viewer’s gaze.

The legacy in contemporary sculpture

The influence of Constantin Brâncuși on contemporary sculpture is vast and multifaceted, extending far beyond the historical context in which the artist operated. His research helped redefine the very concept of sculpture, opening the way to new modes of relationship between form, space, and perception.

Many developments in the art of the second half of the twentieth century find in his work a point of origin, particularly with regard to attention to spatial dimension and to the viewer’s perception of the artwork. Sculpture is no longer conceived as an isolated object, but as an element within a system of relationships involving environment and viewer.

Formal reduction, the centrality of process, and attention to matter are aspects that reappear in numerous later artistic experiences, testifying to the depth and endurance of Brâncuși’s legacy.

A model for the avant-garde

Brâncuși’s research represented a fundamental point of reference for the historical avant-gardes and for many twentieth-century artists, who recognized in his work one of the matrices of modern sculpture. His approach to form, based on synthesis and essentiality, deeply influenced movements such as minimalism and abstract sculpture.

His ability to conceive sculpture as an autonomous form, freed from representation, opened new expressive possibilities, allowing artists to explore previously uncharted territories. In this sense, Brâncuși can be considered not only an innovator, but also a starting point for many subsequent explorations.

His legacy does not consist merely of a set of formal solutions, but takes shape as a working method grounded in the search for the essential and in the belief that form can convey universal meanings. This approach continues to exert a strong influence, confirming the relevance of his thought in the contemporary art landscape.

Why visit the exhibition

The exhibition represents a significant opportunity to deepen one’s knowledge of Constantin Brâncuși through a rigorous and articulated critical path. It allows for an understanding of the complexity of his research by relating works and cultural contexts.

The exhibition also takes shape as a highly intense visual experience, in which the arrangement of the works and the quality of the display enhance the perceptual dimension of sculpture. The interaction between the sculptures and the exhibition space allows for a full grasp of the complexity of Brâncuși’s language, highlighting the relationship between form, light, and environment.

Understanding the origins of modernity

Visiting the exhibition means engaging with one of the crucial moments in art history, in which sculpture undergoes a radical transformation. The itinerary offers an in-depth view of the dynamics that led to the birth of a new artistic language. The curatorial approach encourages a conscious reading, providing interpretative tools that help understand the relationships between the works and their cultural context.

L'articolo The Origins of Infinity” by the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Painter, architect, stage designer and above all author of the celebrated “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects”, Vasari was one of the principal interpreters of sixteenth-century artistic culture. The exhibition restores the complexity of his artistic and intellectual personality, showing how Rome represented a decisive place of training, confrontation, and affirmation for his career.

Vasari and Rome, the memory of the Renaissance

A central figure in sixteenth-century artistic culture, Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo, 1511 – Florence, 1574) occupies a singular role in the history of European art. A prolific painter and architect, but also a writer and theorist, Vasari was the first author to conceive a true systematic narrative of Italian art of the Renaissance. His most famous work, the Lives, first published in 1550 and expanded in 1568, remains one of the fundamental texts for understanding Renaissance art.

Through this monumental editorial project, Vasari did not simply recount the biographies of artists: he elaborated a genuine historical interpretation of Italian art, identifying the Renaissance as the culmination of a process that began with Giotto and reached its peak in the figures of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Within this perspective, Rome occupies a central position, since it represented the place where the artistic traditions of the Italian peninsula found synthesis and a new monumental dimension.

Rome as an artistic laboratory

During the course of his career Vasari stayed in Rome several times, entering into contact with a complex network of commissions connected to the papal court, the nobility, and the intellectual circles of the time. The city was then the principal center of artistic production in Europe, where the most ambitious projects and the most influential personalities were concentrated.

The encounter with the works of classical antiquity and with the masterpieces of the Roman Renaissance contributed to defining Vasari’s figurative language, characterized by dynamic compositions, an elaborate use of perspective, and a strong narrative tension. This language fully belongs to the culture of Mannerism, the artistic current that in the second half of the sixteenth century reinterpreted the models of the great Renaissance tradition.

Vasari’s role in the construction of art history

Vasari’s contribution is not limited to his pictorial and architectural production. His name is inseparably linked to the birth of modern art historiography. In the pages of the Lives, the author constructs a narrative of Italian art as a continuous progress toward formal perfection, identifying the work of Michelangelo as the culmination of this development.

This interpretative model, despite the limits of the culture of its time, influenced the perception of Renaissance art for centuries. The exhibition at the Capitoline Museums makes it possible to understand how the Roman experience played a decisive role in shaping this historical vision.

Between painting, architecture, and scenography

Vasari’s personality stands out for its extraordinary versatility. In addition to painting, he worked as an architect and as an organizer of ephemeral decorative apparatuses for public celebrations and court ceremonies. This multidisciplinary dimension reflects the model of the Renaissance artist, capable of operating in different fields of artistic production.

In the Roman context, such versatility found fertile ground. The great papal building campaigns required artists capable of coordinating complex projects in which painting, architecture, and decoration were integrated into a single iconographic program.

The exhibition project

The exhibition “Vasari and Rome” was conceived with the aim of reconstructing the relationship between the artist and the city through a wide selection of artworks and documentary materials. The project restores the complexity of Vasari’s figure, presenting him not only as a painter and architect but also as a chronicler and interpreter of the culture of his time.

The exhibition path brings together paintings, drawings, engravings, letters, medals, and documents, offering a multifaceted view of the different aspects of his activity. This variety of materials allows visitors to observe the artist’s work not only in the finished form of the artwork, but also in the processes of conception and in the relationships with patrons.

Loans and participating institutions

The exhibition is enriched through the collaboration of numerous Italian and international institutions. Among the principal loans are works from prestigious collections such as the Uffizi Galleries, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, the National Gallery of Siena, and the National Gallery of Bologna, together with important archives and libraries including the Vatican Apostolic Library.

This network of collaborations makes it possible to reunite works rarely seen together, creating a scholarly context that highlights the European dimension of Vasari’s figure.

Masterpieces on display

Among the most significant works presented are several paintings that testify to the different phases of the artist’s career. Among these stands out the “Resurrection”, created around 1545 in collaboration with Raffaellino del Colle and preserved in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. The work represents one of the most eloquent examples of Vasari’s painting, characterized by articulated compositions and a strong dynamism of figures.

Alongside it is the “Resurrection of Christ” from 1550, from the National Gallery of Siena, which demonstrates the stylistic evolution of the artist toward greater compositional and symbolic complexity.

Vasari’s portraiture

Another important section of the exhibition is dedicated to portrait painting. In this field Vasari demonstrates his ability to capture the psychological dimension of his subjects, as shown by the “Portrait of a Gentleman” from the Strada Nuova Museums in Genoa.

The painting reveals a particular sensitivity in the rendering of expressions and in the construction of the social image of the sitter, qualities that place Vasari within the broader tradition of Renaissance portraiture.

Works from the beginning and end of his career

The exhibition also includes works marking crucial moments in the artist’s activity. Among them are the “Nativity” of 1538, known as the Night of Camaldoli, and the “Annunciation” created between 1570 and 1571. These works allow visitors to observe the evolution of Vasari’s language across more than three decades of artistic production.

The comparison between these works highlights the transition from an early phase still linked to the models of the early Renaissance to a mature phase fully embedded in Mannerist culture.

The exhibition path

The installation within the spaces of Palazzo Caffarelli at the Capitoline Museums offers a particularly meaningful setting for the exhibition. Located on the Capitoline Hill, one of the symbolic places of Rome’s history, the palace allows for a direct dialogue between the works on display and the historical dimension of the city.

The exhibition path is conceived as a narrative that follows the fundamental stages of Vasari’s presence in Rome, connecting the artworks with the cultural and political environments in which they were conceived.

The artist’s Roman stays

One of the central aspects of the exhibition concerns the reconstruction of Vasari’s different Roman stays. During these periods the artist had the opportunity to engage with the great artistic enterprises promoted by the papal court and by aristocratic families.

Rome was then a crossroads for artists coming from all parts of the Italian peninsula, a place where different experiences converged and where new forms of figurative language developed. In this environment Vasari was able to observe firsthand the works of Michelangelo and other protagonists of the Renaissance.

Documents, letters, and drawings

Alongside the paintings, the exhibition presents a rich selection of drawings, letters, and documentary materials. These sources offer a privileged insight into the processes of design and the professional relationships of the artist.

The drawings in particular make it possible to grasp the conceptual phase of the works, revealing the precision with which Vasari constructed his compositions and studied the organization of pictorial space.

Drawing as a tool of design

In Renaissance artistic culture, drawing represented the foundation of the entire creative process. Vasari himself attributed a central role to this practice, considering it the common basis of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

The graphic works displayed in the exhibition allow visitors to observe the artist’s working method, characterized by great attention to the construction of figures and the distribution of masses within space.

Why visit the exhibition

The exhibition represents an important opportunity to explore the figure of one of the protagonists of Renaissance culture. The exhibition does not simply present a selection of artworks, but proposes a broader reflection on Vasari’s role as an interpreter and narrator of the art of his time.

An artist at the center of sixteenth-century culture

Through the dialogue between paintings, drawings, and documents, the exhibition path allows visitors to understand the complexity of Vasari’s figure. Painter and architect, but also theorist and historian, Vasari contributed decisively to the construction of the image of Italian art during the Renaissance.

The exhibition also highlights the role of Rome as a center of cultural elaboration, a place where artists, writers, and patrons participated in the definition of new figurative models.

Rome and the memory of the Renaissance

Visiting this exhibition also means reflecting on the relationship between the city and its artistic tradition. Rome was not only the stage for the monumental enterprises of the Renaissance, but also the place where a critical reflection on art and its history developed.

In this context, the figure of Vasari acquires particular significance. Through his work as both writer and artist, he helped define the very image of the Italian Renaissance, transforming the memory of artworks and artists into a narrative that would influence European culture for centuries.

L'articolo Giorgio Vasari and Rome: the Italian Renaissance proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Drawings, lithographs, illustrated books and the celebrated papiers découpés reveal the process through which the artist redefined the principles of modern composition. The exhibition does not merely present works of great visual appeal, but proposes a critical reflection on a decisive phase in the history of twentieth-century art.

Henri Matisse and the search for the essential

The master of Fauvism beyond painting

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 1869 – Cimiez, 1954) occupies a central position in the history of modern art. A protagonist of the European avant-gardes and a leading figure of Fauvism, the French painter revolutionized the use of color, transforming it from a descriptive element into a structural principle of composition. The celebrated canvases of the early twentieth century, characterized by intense chromatic contrasts and an anti-naturalistic approach, inaugurated a new conception of pictorial space and profoundly influenced European art.

However, reducing his work to this phase would oversimplify an extremely complex creative trajectory. After the Parisian avant-garde years, Matisse undertook a long stylistic evolution that gradually led him toward increasingly essential forms. During the 1920s and 1930s, the artist developed a research that crossed drawing, graphic arts, artists’ books, and stage design, expanding the field of his visual experimentation.

The Nice period and the transformation of language

A decisive chapter of this journey corresponds to the so-called Nice period, which occupies a significant portion of the artist’s career. In these years Matisse deepened the relationship between line and color, developing an increasingly synthetic visual grammar. The figure is no longer constructed through the accumulation of pictorial matter, but emerges from a calibrated balance between sign and surface.

The artist’s creative process is based on a principle of progressive reduction. Every superfluous element is eliminated until an essential structure is reached. In this context, graphic work assumes a fundamental role. Drawing becomes a space of formal concentration in which the gesture must be immediate and definitive. As Matisse himself observed: “I make no distinction between the execution of a book and that of a painting.” This statement underscores the continuity between the different fields of his research.

The line as a form of thought

In the drawings and lithographs produced from the 1920s onward, the line assumes an autonomous function. It does not merely delimit forms but becomes the place where the very idea of the image takes shape. The Matissian sign, apparently spontaneous, is in fact the result of a long mental elaboration.

This economy of gesture reveals a profoundly modern conception of the artistic process. The artwork does not arise from technical complexity, but from the ability to identify formal balance through a few essential elements. In this perspective, paper is not a secondary support but rather a privileged space of experimentation.

Works on paper and the birth of the Papiers Découpés

A formal revolution in twentieth-century art

Matisse’s production on paper represents one of the most significant contributions to postwar art. Drawings, lithographs and editorial illustrations testify to an approach to composition based on synthesis and on the equilibrium between solids and voids.

In these works the white of the paper plays an active role in the construction of the image. It is not merely a neutral background but a structural component of the composition. The relationship between sign and surface thus becomes an integral part of the creative process.

The famous Cut-Outs

In the 1940s, following a serious illness that often forced him to work from a wheelchair, Matisse introduced a technique destined to mark the history of modern art: the papiers découpés, also known as cut-outs.

The procedure appears deceptively simple. The artist painted large sheets of paper with gouache, cut them with scissors, and recomposed them on the surface according to a dynamic balance. In reality, behind this apparent simplicity lies a complex process of visual design.

The cut shapes become constructive elements of a language based on the relationship between color and space. The forms do not imitate reality but generate autonomous structures, often characterized by a visual rhythm that recalls music or dance.

The Book “Jazz” and editorial art

Among the most emblematic achievements of this phase is the celebrated book Jazz, published in 1947. The lithographic plates that compose it represent one of the highest moments of Matisse’s artistic research.

The images are constructed through colored forms that resemble visual improvisations, analogous to the musical structure of jazz. The result is a sequence of vibrant compositions in which color and rhythm become instruments of a new form of visual narration.

Exhibition path

Itinerary in four sections

The exhibition unfolds through four thematic sections, conceived to convey the complexity of Matisse’s graphic production. More than one hundred works allow visitors to observe the evolution of the artist’s language and the progressive transition from painting to paper as a privileged space of creation.

Verve: Matisse and art publishing

The first section is dedicated to the magazine Verve, an editorial project directed by Tériade that brought together some of the leading figures of modern art. The lithographs and drawings on display testify to the dialogue between image and text and show how Matisse used the printed page as a field of experimentation.

The line becomes essential, reduced to a few strokes capable of suggesting the figure with extraordinary effectiveness. This graphic economy anticipates many of the solutions developed in later years.

Artists’ books and illustration

The second section explores Matisse’s relationship with the illustrated book. Drawings created for literary works such as Une fête en Cimmérie and Lettres Portugaises demonstrate how the artist was able to translate emotional states and psychological tensions into images through only a few signs.

In these works the human face becomes the privileged site of expressive research. Thin and precise lines evoke complex emotions without resorting to unnecessary details.

The Book Jazz

A specific section is dedicated to the famous book Jazz, featuring a selection of lithographic plates that testify to the culmination of the artist’s research on paper cut-outs. Colored forms are arranged across the surface with a visual rhythm that resembles a musical score.

These images are not simple illustrations but fully autonomous compositions in which color becomes structure and movement.

Drawing

The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to drawing, a central element in Matisse’s poetics. Lithographs and graphic studies show how the sign can define the human body through a language reduced to its essential elements.

Particularly significant are the series of female nudes, in which the contour of the figure emerges from a few fluid lines. In these works the tension between abstraction and figuration reaches one of the highest points of the artist’s research.

Why visit the exhibition

Visiting the exhibition means confronting a phase that is often less known yet decisive in the artist’s career. Far from the stereotypical image of the Fauvist painter, Matisse appears here as an artist capable of reinventing his language until the final years of his life.

In this sense, the exhibition offers not only an aesthetic experience but also a reflection on the very meaning of artistic creation: a journey in which the search for the essential becomes the key to understanding the modernity of Henri Matisse’s work.

Understanding the artistic maturity of Matisse

Through drawings, lithographs and cut-paper compositions, visitors are invited to observe the process through which Matisse transformed artistic gesture into an act of balance and precision. The works, apparently simple, reveal a sophisticated and deeply innovative visual thinking.

Laboratory of modernity

The works on paper testify to a conception of art based on the freedom of means and on the ability to transform simple materials into instruments of radical experimentation. Paper, scissors and color become the elements of a research that anticipates many tendencies of contemporary art.

Value of formal synthesis

Matisse’s lesson emerges with particular clarity in the works on display: the complexity of the image does not derive from the accumulation of elements, but from the ability to identify an essential form. This pursuit of synthesis represents one of the most enduring contributions of the artist to the visual culture of the twentieth century.

L'articolo The Last Matisse. Morphologies of Paper proviene da ArcheoRoma.

The central role attributed to light, understood not merely as a physical phenomenon but as a dramaturgical and theological device, constitutes the core of the entire exhibition path. The show invites reflection on the modernity of a visual language that, breaking with Mannerist idealization, established a new relationship between image, reality, and viewer.

Caravaggio and the revolution of light

At the heart of the exhibition stands the figure of Caravaggio, protagonist of a radical transformation in figurative language. His work marks a turning point in the history of Western art: the abandonment of Mannerist abstraction, the rejection of the idealized construction of the body, and the choice of models drawn from everyday reality established a new visual paradigm. Caravaggesque naturalism was not mere imitation of the real, but a masterful construction of pictorial truth, founded on a calibrated use of light and shadow.

Light as narrative structure

In Caravaggio’s visual vocabulary, light does not merely define volumes or make space perceptible: it becomes the generative element of the scene. The beam of light isolates, selects, judges. Through sharp contrasts and sudden luminous epiphanies, the artist constructs a visual dramaturgy in which the sacred manifests within the everyday. Chiaroscuro thus acquires both theological and theatrical value, guiding the viewer’s gaze and emotionally involving them in the depicted event.

Naturalism and the truth of reality

The choice of popular models, the depiction of bodies marked by time, and the tangible rendering of objects and surfaces—from fabrics to musical instruments, from weapons to natural elements—demonstrate a desire to adhere to reality that deeply unsettled contemporaries. Painting becomes a space for direct engagement with matter and sensory experience, rejecting any abstract idealization.

Roman context and immediate reception

Within the cultural climate of Counter-Reformation Rome, Caravaggio’s painting found fertile yet conflictual ground. The demands for narrative clarity and emotional engagement promoted by ecclesiastical patronage intertwined with the innovative force of a language that broke with academic tradition. Success was rapid and controversial, generating a phenomenon of imitation and reinterpretation that gave rise to Caravaggism.

Caravaggism

The exhibition broadens its perspective beyond the figure of the master, reconstructing the complex network of painters who embraced his legacy. Caravaggism was not a unified movement, but a multifaceted constellation of experiences that interpreted the lesson of light according to different sensibilities and contexts. The exhibition highlights these variations, underscoring how Caravaggesque naturalism evolved into a European language.

Dialogue between master and followers

Within the exhibition, light emerges as the true unifying element between the master and his followers. It is not merely a technical device, but a structural principle that shapes space, models bodies, and organizes narrative. The luminous beam, often originating from a source outside the canvas, selects the protagonists and isolates them from the dark background, creating an effect of theatrical suspension.

In Caravaggio’s paintings, light assumes an almost judging value: it reveals, exposes, indicates. It constructs an internal hierarchy within the image, guiding the viewer’s eye toward the focal point of the action. This same device is embraced and reinterpreted by the Masters of Light, who at times amplify its contemplative dimension, at others its dramatic force. In the French sphere, for instance, light becomes more intimate and silent; in the Spanish context, it takes on harsh and material tones; among Italian painters, it tends to preserve a more explicit narrative tension.

Italian Caravaggisti

The first sections of the exhibition function as a critical threshold: not merely a prologue, but the immediate echo of the Caravaggesque impact. Around the figure of Caravaggio, European painting experienced a fracture that was both linguistic and moral. Within this context stand the followers closest to the master, such as Bartolomeo Manfredi and Antiveduto Gramatica, interpreters of a season in which Merisi’s lesson was adopted with almost programmatic intensity.

In Manfredi, the scene becomes close and compressed, inhabited by half-length figures immersed in compact darkness from which light emerges frontally and decisively. His naturalism concentrates the event, confining it within a closed space and transforming narrative into a direct confrontation between gesture and gaze.

Gramatica, more measured yet no less engaged, embraces Caravaggio’s luminous tension by modulating it within more composed structures, where chiaroscuro does not explode but silently engraves surfaces. In both cases, light is already an autonomous language, an ordering force that replaces traditional perspectival construction.

The Gentileschi

The path continues with figures who reinterpret Caravaggesque naturalism in a more intimate and poetic key. Orazio Gentileschi softens the harshness of contrast, replacing immediate drama with a clear, almost enamel-like light that envelops bodies with linear elegance. In his compositions, silence prevails over gesture, and theatricality transforms into lyrical suspension. Orazio translates dramatic tension into a more lyrical and controlled measure.

Among Caravaggio’s followers, Artemisia Gentileschi occupies a position of particular prominence, not only for the quality of her painting but for the depth with which she internalized and transformed the Caravaggesque lesson. While many interpreters merely replicated compositional models or lighting effects, Artemisia grasped its most radical core: the idea that the truth of the body and emotion could become the privileged vehicle of sacred and historical narrative. She intensifies the psychological dimension and the narrative force of female figures.

Spread across Europe

Caravaggism quickly crossed Italian borders, finding interpreters in France, Flanders, and Spain. The exhibition expands to an international dimension with foreign painters such as Stomer, De Ribera, and Van der Helst, artists who developed a poetics of nocturnal light and contemplative silence, transforming chiaroscuro contrast into inner meditation and restoring the international scope of the phenomenon.

Matthias Stomer brought to Northern Europe an intense nocturnal version of chiaroscuro, emphasizing the luminous vibration of scenes illuminated by torches and candles. Jusepe de Ribera, active in Naples, radicalized the material component: light cuts across skin, highlights its roughness, and renders the suffering of saints and martyrs tangible. In the Dutch context, Bartholomeus van der Helst absorbed the Caravaggesque lesson, translating it into a more descriptive sensibility in which luminous contrast dialogues with attention to detail and psychological rendering.

Particularly evocative is the comparison with Trophime Bigot, renowned for his ability to paint the flame of a candle as the sole generative center of the scene. In these works, light is not only a dramatic element but an intimate, fragile, almost domestic event: a silent revelation that finds in darkness its necessary counterpart.

Light as a shared language

Despite stylistic differences, what unites these masters is the use of light as a structural principle. Raking illumination, dark backgrounds, and compressed theatrical spaces generate an intense visual experience in which time seems suspended. Painting becomes stage, and stage becomes a place of revelation. Chiaroscuro thus becomes a shared language capable of crossing geographic and cultural boundaries. It is through light that Caravaggism spreads, transforming into a European poetics of the real.

Exhibition path

The focal point of the entire exhibition is the oil on canvas The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1600–1601), an emblematic work of Caravaggio’s poetics. In this painting, light is not scenery but revelation. Thomas’s gesture as he plunges his finger into Christ’s side is not merely a Gospel episode: it is an act of knowledge, a tangible experience of faith. Light, concentrated on faces and hands, guides the viewer’s gaze into the wound, transforming observation into participation. Realism is pushed to the limit of physical contact, yet precisely in this concreteness the spiritual dimension manifests itself.

The exhibition itinerary unfolds in thematic sections that allow visitors to grasp the evolution of Caravaggesque language and its subsequent transformations. The display favors close dialogue between works, avoiding a purely chronological arrangement and instead proposing conceptual nuclei centered on themes such as vocation, martyrdom, music, meditation, and still life.

Thematic sections and direct comparisons

Particular emphasis is placed on visual comparisons between works by the master and paintings by his followers. These juxtapositions reveal affinities and divergences, highlighting how the original lesson was at times radicalized, at others softened. The curatorial strategy aims to make perceptible the dynamic transmission of language, rather than simply presenting a repertoire of masterpieces.

Representation of the sacred

A significant section is devoted to religious subjects, in which light assumes symbolic value. The sudden gesture, the expression captured at its culminating instant, and the concrete rendering of bodies convey an idea of incarnate spirituality. The experience of the divine manifests through sensory reality, according to a principle of identification that involves the viewer. Light becomes a sign of grace and divine calling, where luminous irruption coincides with the spiritual event.

Genre scenes and still life

Alongside sacred themes, the exhibition focuses on genre scenes and still lifes, fields in which Caravaggesque naturalism finds particularly evident expression. Everyday objects, musical instruments, fruits, and furnishings are rendered with extraordinary tactile precision, transforming the ordinary into a pictorial event.

Installation and space

The display, calibrated to enhance the luminous qualities of the works, allows for a clear perception of chiaroscuro contrasts as a shared language, offering visitors a critical and informed experience. Space thus becomes an integral part of the curatorial narrative.

Why visit the exhibition

Visiting the exhibition means engaging with one of the most decisive seasons in the history of European art. The show provides critical tools to understand how the Caravaggesque revolution redefined the relationship between art and reality, profoundly influencing the visual culture of subsequent centuries.

Opportunity for historical and artistic insight

The exhibition addresses both scholars and an informed, interested public, offering an articulated reading of seventeenth-century naturalism. Through a coherent and well-documented path, visitors are guided toward an understanding of the stylistic, iconographic, and cultural dynamics that determined the birth and spread of Caravaggism.

Modernity of Caravaggio

Caravaggio’s extraordinary relevance lies in his ability to convey the complexity of human experience without idealizing filters. His painting continues to question the contemporary viewer, raising issues related to truth, representation, and the relationship between light and shadow, understood not only as formal categories but as metaphors of existence.

L'articolo Caravaggio and the Masters of Light proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Painting and image in Rome in the second half of the twentieth century

The exhibition is a large-scale curatorial project dedicated to one of the most significant artists, a protagonist of Italian Pop Art and contemporary painting. The retrospective aims to offer a multifaceted reading of his production, which spanned painting, photography and image culture in Rome during the second half of the twentieth century, a historical moment marked by the radical transformation of visual languages.

Roman beginnings of the 1950s and 1960s

The Roman beginnings of Mario Schifano constitute a fundamental chapter for understanding the genesis of his language. Having moved to the capital at a very young age, the artist came into contact with a vibrant cultural environment shaped by tensions between the legacy of Informal art and the first impulses of renewal that would lead to the season of the so-called School of Piazza del Popolo.

Rome, in those years, was a crossroads for artists, intellectuals, filmmakers and writers. Private galleries and cafés in the historic center became places of debate and experimentation. In this context, Schifano developed a sensitivity attentive to the transformations of visual culture, showing from his earliest works a desire to move beyond both naturalism and the dominant lyrical abstraction.

From matter to the zeroing of the image

The early works reveal an interest in the surface as an autonomous field of investigation. The pictorial matter is treated directly, sometimes roughly, with particular attention to the physicality of the support. However, it is with the celebrated monochromes that Schifano performs a radical gesture: reducing the image to a pure field of color.

These works, created on canvas-backed paper using industrial enamels, represent a moment of symbolic zeroing. By eliminating figuration, the artist seems to restart from a zero degree of painting. Yet this reduction does not coincide with expressive impoverishment: on the contrary, the color vibrates across the surface, retaining the trace of the gesture and establishing a silent dialogue with the architectural space that hosts it.

Confrontation with mass culture

Already in his Roman beginnings, Schifano’s interest in the signs of urban modernity becomes evident: writings, brands, road signs. The artist understood that the new iconography of the present was no longer mythological or historical, but produced by the consumer society. By incorporating these elements into painting, he inaugurated a reflection destined to shape his entire career.

Between photography and painting: a structural dialogue

Photographic image as matrix

The relationship between photography and painting occupies a central position in Schifano’s research and receives extensive treatment in the exhibition. From the mid-1960s onward, the artist used photographs taken directly or sourced from newspapers and television as the basis for his paintings. The photographic image becomes a matrix to be reworked, not a model to be faithfully reproduced.

The canvas thus becomes a space of translation: the photographic data are enlarged, grainy, chromatically altered. Painting intervenes to underline the distance between reality and representation, between document and interpretation. In this passage one can grasp Schifano’s intention to question the very nature of the technical image.

Surface as a place of overlapping

In works where photography and painting overlap, the surface appears stratified. Transparencies, glazes and graphic signs interrupt the continuity of the image, emphasizing its artificial construction. The artist does not conceal the process, but makes it an integral part of the work.

This practice anticipates reflections that would become central in contemporary visual culture: the manipulability of the image, its accelerated circulation, the loss of a stable referent. Schifano demonstrates how painting can still perform a critical function, transforming photographic appropriation into an occasion for analysis and distancing.

The “TV Landscapes” as linguistic synthesis

The so-called “TV Landscapes” represent one of the most well-known outcomes of this dialogue. By photographing the television screen and subsequently intervening on the canvas, Schifano translates the television flow into a pictorial image. The result is a fragmentary vision, often crossed by signs that disturb its legibility.

In these works, television is not merely an iconographic subject, but a conceptual device: it embodies the new perceptual condition of contemporary humanity, immersed in a continuous flow of images.

Experimental cinema and the moving image

Season of experimental films

A substantial focus is devoted to the production of experimental cinema, an integral part of Schifano’s poetics. Between the late 1960s and the 1970s, the artist created films that reflect the same tension toward fragmentation and linguistic contamination present in his painting.

These works are characterized by rapid editing, the absence of linear narrative, and the free use of color and superimposition. Cinema becomes a laboratory in which to experiment with new modes of perception, questioning the traditional distinction between visual arts and temporal arts.

Moving image as an extension of painting

In Schifano’s filmic experience, the moving image does not replace painting, but constitutes its extension. The pictorial gesture translates into visual sequences that retain a strong poetic component. Even within the cinematic medium, the artist preserves a lyrical and visionary attitude, avoiding both documentary realism and spectacularization.

The exhibition presents film and documentary materials that allow visitors to understand the continuity between canvas and film, between static surface and temporal flow. In this way, it becomes clear that Schifano’s work cannot be reduced to a single disciplinary category, but must be read as a complex investigation of the image in modernity.

Exhibition path: rotunda and Piano Nobile

A Coherent Architectural Itinerary

The installation in the rotunda and in the seven large rooms on the piano nobile allows for an organic distribution of the works, respecting both chronology and thematic articulations. The rotunda introduces visitors to the immersive dimension of the exhibition, while the subsequent rooms develop the main nuclei of Schifano’s research.

The monumentality of the space enhances the large-format works and allows for direct engagement with the physicality of painting. At the same time, the sections dedicated to cinema and audiovisual materials are placed in environments suitable for collective viewing, reinforcing the idea of a path that traverses different media.

In this spatial articulation, the exhibition “Mario Schifano” offers not only a historical reconstruction, but a critical experience that invites reflection on the enduring relevance of his work within contemporary image culture.

The project

The exhibition is promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, which oversee its institutional and cultural direction. The exhibition project is produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, in collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo and Gallerie d’Italia, strategic partners contributing to the realization and enhancement of the initiative. The Main Partner of the exhibition is ENI, whose support strengthens the project’s national and international scope. The exhibition also benefits from the support of Fondazione Silvano Toti, which contributes to the promotion and development of the cultural activities connected to the show.

L'articolo Mario Schifano: Painting, Image, and Media Modernity proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Conceived as both an artistic and civic gesture, the exhibition reaffirms a commitment to restoring to the city a space devoted to art, fashion, and culture as tools for dialogue and social growth. Beauty is presented not as a static ideal, but as an active force capable of generating meaning and transformation. Through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos the exhibition space becomes a site where aesthetic experience meets ethical reflection and where cultural production engages with contemporary complexities.

At its core, Venus affirms that beauty must be shared and continually redefined. Artistic creation and haute couture are understood as complementary languages shaping collective imagination. Through myth, contemporary art, and participatory practices, the exhibition reflects on the enduring cultural and social relevance of beauty.

The conceptual framework of Venus

The exhibition takes its title from Venus, a figure that has traversed centuries of Western culture as a symbol of beauty, desire, and generative power. In this context, Venus is neither a nostalgic citation nor a purely iconographic reference, but an operative concept, an archetype through which to interrogate the present. The mythological dimension is reactivated and reinterpreted, opening up new meanings that resonate with contemporary concerns related to identity, resilience, and collective responsibility.

Beauty as a transformative force

In Venus, beauty is framed as a dynamic principle capable of producing harmony and, by extension, envisioning possibilities of social balance and justice. This idea, explicitly articulated by Joana Vasconcelos, underpins the entire project. Beauty is not detached from reality; rather, it is deeply entangled with it, functioning as a catalyst for awareness and change. The exhibition proposes beauty as an ethical and political dimension, one that can counter fragmentation and foster solidarity in a world marked by increasing social fractures.

Myth, abstraction, and contemporary relevance

Through abstraction, Vasconcelos revisits garments, forms, and textile surfaces associated with the heritage of Valentino Garavani, generating a visual language that does not imitate haute couture but engages in a profound dialogue with it. The resulting works evoke the mythological figure of a Valkyrie-like Venus, an abstract heroine that embodies strength, protection, and resilience. This reinterpretation situates Venus firmly within the present, transforming her into an emblem of contemporary vitality and resistance.

Joana Vasconcelos and the dialogue with haute couture

Central to the exhibition is the presence of Joana Vasconcelos, whose practice is renowned for its ability to merge monumental scale with intricate craftsmanship, and conceptual rigor with emotional resonance. In Venus, her work enters into a direct and meaningful exchange with the legacy of Valentino Garavani, establishing a dialogue that unfolds progressively throughout the exhibition and culminates in a suspended, almost contemplative final convergence.

Valkyrie Venus

The monumental installation presented by Vasconcelos constitutes the conceptual and visual fulcrum of the exhibition. Composed of thousands of decorative elements, the work gives form to a contemporary and abstract heroine, an embodiment of power, protection, and endurance. The figure of Venus emerges not as an idealized body, but as a collective presence, shaped by the accumulation of gestures, materials, and human contributions.

The work Venus, conceived by the artist and realized through the contribution of thousands of hands and ten distinguished institutional partners, functions simultaneously as an artistic and social device. More than one hundred students from Art and Fashion Academies took part in its creation, alongside local communities and civic organizations, transforming the making of the artwork into a shared experience of learning and co-creation.

Craftsmanship and symbolic density

The work’s surface, dense with textile modules and ornamental components, reflects a profound respect for craftsmanship as a bearer of knowledge and memory. By engaging with the language of haute couture, understood as a discipline of majestic beauty and refined, almost hieratic excellence, Vasconcelos constructs a bridge between artistic abstraction and sartorial intelligence. The result is a powerful synthesis in which material complexity becomes a vehicle for symbolic depth.

Exhibition path of “Venus”

The exhibition path of “Venus” is conceived as a non-linear journey, structured through thematic resonances rather than chronological sequences. Emblematic works by Joana Vasconcelos are juxtaposed with newly conceived site-specific installations inspired by the aesthetic and material universe of Valentino Garavani. This curatorial approach encourages visitors to navigate the space intuitively, engaging with the works through association, contrast, and reflection.

Within this dialogue, the legacy of Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti emerges as a foundational presence. More than a fashion house, their shared vision represents a model of creative and entrepreneurial partnership that has shaped contemporary haute couture. The exhibition pays tribute to their longstanding collaboration, highlighting how artistic sensibility and managerial foresight converged to construct a global cultural phenomenon rooted in craftsmanship, discipline, and aesthetic coherence.

The collaboration between Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti

At the heart of this narrative lies the extraordinary partnership between Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti. Since the founding of the Maison in Rome in 1960, their collaboration has embodied a rare balance between artistic inspiration and strategic vision. Valentino’s pursuit of formal perfection, chromatic harmony, and timeless elegance found in Giammetti a complementary force capable of translating creativity into institutional structure and international expansion.

The exhibition explores this dual authorship not only through archival materials, sketches, garments, and visual documentation, but also by evoking the intangible dimension of their dialogue: a shared intuition of beauty as discipline and as emotional intensity. Their relationship demonstrates how haute couture can transcend fashion to become a cultural language, capable of shaping collective imagination and redefining standards of refinement.

Participatory and collective project

One of the defining aspects of Venus is its nature as an ambitious participatory art project. The monumental work at the heart of the exhibition was conceived by the artist and realized through the collaboration of thousands of hands, transforming the act of making into a shared experience. Over 756 hours of workshops and the involvement of more than 200 participants of different ages and backgrounds testify to the project’s extensive social reach.

Community, education, and social inclusion

The realization of the work involved students of art and fashion academies, patients and families from healthcare institutions, women from shelters supporting refugees and victims of violence, and inmates from correctional facilities. More than 200 kilograms of crocheted modules were produced across the city and sent to the artist’s studio in Lisbon, converging into a single collective gesture. This process foregrounds the transmission of skills and traditions as instruments of empowerment, care, and shared resilience.

In this context, the values historically associated with the Maison founded by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti—attention to craftsmanship, respect for manual knowledge, and intergenerational dialogue—resonate with the participatory dimension of the project. The exhibition thus establishes a bridge between haute couture and collective practice, between excellence and inclusivity, reaffirming beauty as a shared and transformative force.

Why visiting Venus matters

To visit Venus is to engage with a vision of art and fashion that transcends aesthetic contemplation and embraces social responsibility. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to witness how beauty can operate as a connective force, capable of generating dialogue between disciplines, communities, and individual experiences.

By foregrounding participation, craftsmanship, and cultural memory, Venus articulates a model of artistic practice rooted in solidarity and collective imagination. This collective dimension does not remain confined within the exhibition space; rather, it extends into the urban fabric, establishing a direct dialogue with some of the most emblematic sites of the capital.

Diffused Installations

Piazza Mignanelli – I’ll Be Your Mirror

In Piazza Mignanelli, a historic urban space at the foot of Trinità dei Monti and home to the Valentino Maison, the installation I’ll Be Your Mirror engages with the public and monumental dimension of Baroque Rome. The work acts as a symbolic reflective surface, inviting viewers to recognize themselves within the collective space and to question the relationship between individual identity and shared imagination.

The choice of this location is significant: here, the history of Roman haute couture meets the artistic memory of the city, creating a dialogue between tradition and contemporary experimentation.

Terrazza del Pincio – Solitaire

At the Terrazza del Pincio, one of the most celebrated panoramic viewpoints overlooking the city, the installation Solitaire introduces a sculptural presence that dialogues with the urban landscape and the contemplative nature of the belvedere.

Here, the artwork confronts the horizon and the Romantic tradition of gazing upon the Eternal City, transforming the act of observation into a meditation on beauty as both shared and intimate experience. The intervention temporarily reshapes the perception of the panorama, inserting a contemporary element into a historically layered setting.

Ara Pacis – Drag Race

At the Ara Pacis, the Augustan monument symbolizing peace and imperial foundation, the installation Drag Race introduces a dynamic and ironic intervention that contrasts with the solemnity of the ancient structure and the contemporary minimalism of the museum designed by Richard Meier.

The work activates a dialogue between antiquity and contemporaneity, between historical monumentality and current artistic languages, reaffirming Rome’s vocation as a site of continuous overlap and transformation. In this context, beauty is not a static celebration of the past, but a living process capable of rewriting the meaning of places through new narratives.

Beauty as a shared cultural practice

Through these diffused installations, Venus emerges not merely as an exhibition, but as a true urban geography of beauty. The project extends beyond museum walls, engaging squares, panoramic terraces, and monumental complexes in a path that intertwines contemporary art, haute couture, and public space.

The city thus becomes an integral part of the exhibition device: not simply a backdrop, but an active interlocutor. Each intervention temporarily redefines the perception of its surroundings, inviting citizens and visitors alike to experience Rome as an open laboratory where historical memory and contemporary research coexist in productive tension.

L'articolo VENUS: Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Habsburgs and the construction of an imperial collection

The theoretical core of the exhibition is embodied by the Habsburg dynasty and the decisive role it played in defining a modern idea of collecting. Through a coherent and forward-looking cultural policy, the Habsburgs transformed the gathering of artworks into an instrument of self-representation and consolidation of power.

European dynasty between politics and culture

From the end of the Middle Ages to the contemporary era, the Habsburgs ruled vast territories stretching from Central Europe to the Iberian Peninsula, from the Low Countries to Italy. This supranational dimension is reflected in the imperial collections, which include works from various European artistic schools. Art thus becomes the mirror of a political vision founded on the universality of the Empire and the construction of a shared dynastic memory.

Flemish school

The presence of Flemish masters reflects the dynastic bond between the Habsburgs and the Low Countries. Northern painting, with its attention to detail and material rendering, introduces a visual language in which realism and symbolism coexist in subtle balance.

Marriage strategy and artistic heritage

The celebrated Habsburg matrimonial alliances not only produced geopolitical effects but also led to the transfer of artworks, treasures, and entire collections among European courts. In this way, the imperial collection was enriched with Flemish, Italian, and Spanish masterpieces, giving rise to a heritage of extraordinary stylistic and iconographic variety.

Collecting as a language of power

Within the early modern context, Habsburg collecting assumed a symbolic dimension. The works were not simply precious objects, but instruments of political communication. The choice of subjects, official portraits, mythological scenes, allegories of virtue and justice, helped shape the ideal image of the sovereign.

Birth of a modern museum vision

The gradual organization of the imperial collections foreshadowed the birth of the public museum. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, established to preserve this heritage, represents the outcome of a long process of systematization and enhancement, in which the private dimension of the collection was transformed into shared cultural patrimony.

Renaissance and Baroque

The exhibition allows visitors to traverse two fundamental seasons of European art history: the Renaissance and the Baroque. The Habsburg collections take shape as a visual atlas documenting the evolution of figurative languages between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, offering a privileged perspective on the aesthetic and ideological transformations of the period.

Legacy of the Italian Renaissance

For the Habsburgs, the Renaissance represented an indispensable cultural model. Admiration for Italian art translated into the acquisition of works embodying principles of harmony, proportion, and the centrality of the human figure. Renaissance painting, with its pursuit of compositional balance and narrative clarity, became a paradigm of civilization and prestige.

Centrality of drawing and perspective

The Renaissance works included in the exhibition highlight the importance of drawing as the foundation of form and perspective as a tool for organizing space. In them one perceives the ambition to restore a rational order to the visible world, in harmony with the political vision of an ordered and hierarchical empire.

Theatricality of the european Baroque

With the seventeenth century, figurative language became more dynamic and dramatic. The Baroque expressed a new sensibility characterized by movement, pathos, and luminous intensity. Works from Flemish and Italian contexts demonstrate how art became a vehicle of emotion and persuasion, aligned with the needs of the Counter-Reformation and the self-representation of absolute power.

Rubens and the international dimension of the Baroque

The presence of works connected to the circle of Peter Paul Rubens testifies to the international vocation of the Habsburg court. Rubens, an artist-diplomat, perfectly embodied the conjunction of art and politics: his monumental compositions, animated by twisting bodies and vibrant chromaticism, translate into images the complexity of Baroque Europe.

Works linked to the culture of Peter Paul Rubens express the vitality and dynamism of the Baroque. Bodies in motion, intense colors, and diagonal compositions render visually the spiritual and political tension of seventeenth-century Europe.

Exhibition path

The curatorial project develops according to a structure that intertwines chronology and themes, enabling visitors to understand not only the stylistic evolution of the works but also the historical and ideological context in which they were acquired.

Representation of sovereignty

An initial section is devoted to the construction of the sovereign’s image. Official portraits, characterized by rigorous frontal settings or solemn poses, define an iconographic model aimed at expressing authority, continuity, and legitimacy.

Symbols, attributes, and visual codes

Each iconographic element, from armor to heraldic coats of arms, from precious fabrics to symbolic objects, contributes to building a codified language of power. The analysis of these details reveals the complexity of visual communication in the early modern period.

Wunderkammer and universal knowledge

A further nucleus explores the theme of the Wunderkammer, the “cabinet of curiosities” that brought together artworks, rare objects, and natural wonders. This model reflects the aspiration to encyclopedic knowledge, in which the sovereign presents himself as guarantor of the world’s order.

Art, nature, and wonder

The coexistence of artistic artifacts and natural objects suggests a unified vision of knowledge. Art is not separated from science but serves as its symbolic complement, contributing to the definition of an image of power capable of understanding and mastering reality.

Dialogue with Rome

The exhibition’s arrival in Rome carries particular significance. The city, center of Christianity and a place of millennial artistic stratification, offers an ideal context for reflecting on the relationship between tradition and power. The encounter between the Viennese works and Rome’s historical memory enriches the reading of the exhibition path.

The Italian school is represented by works that highlight the centrality of drawing, compositional harmony, and the masterful use of light. In them one recognizes the legacy of a tradition that, from the Renaissance to the Baroque, redefined the parameters of Western art.

Cultural bridge between Vienna and Rome

The exhibition configures itself as a cultural bridge between two symbolic capitals of Europe. Through the dialogue between the works and the exhibition space, visitors are invited to consider art history as a fabric of relationships, exchanges, and reciprocal influences.

From Renaissance composure to Baroque drama, the itinerary allows one to grasp the transformations of figurative language, offering an articulated perspective on the stylistic dynamics that traversed Europe.

Why visit the exhibition

The visit represents an opportunity for in-depth study for scholars, enthusiasts, and a cultivated public. The exhibition allows close observation of works rarely visible outside their Viennese home, offering a broad perspective on European figurative culture. The exhibition does not merely display masterpieces but proposes a reflection on the role of art as an instrument of representation and construction of identity.

Critical and conscious experience

The scientific rigor of the curatorial framework, combined with the quality of the selected works, enables a thoughtful rather than superficial experience. The exhibition invites reflection on the relationship between art and power, between collecting and cultural identity.

Opportunity to understand Europe

In a contemporary context marked by tensions and redefinitions of identity, the exhibition path offers the opportunity to rediscover the shared roots of European culture. The wonders of the Habsburgs thus become instruments of knowledge and historical reflection, restoring to art its primary function as testimony and memory.

L'articolo From Vienna to Rome. Habsburg Wonders from the Kunsthistorisches Museum proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Bice Lazzari: biography and formation

Venetian years and early training

Born in Venice in 1900, Bice Lazzari developed her artistic identity within a cultural environment deeply rooted in tradition yet increasingly receptive to modern experimentation. Initially trained in music, an education that would later influence the rhythmic structure of her compositions, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Her early works are grounded in figuration, revealing a careful attention to compositional balance and structural clarity.

Alongside painting, Lazzari devoted considerable energy to applied arts and decorative design during the 1920s and 1930s. Far from being a marginal activity, this engagement provided a crucial laboratory for her understanding of modular structures, surface articulation, and the dialogue between form and space. Even in these early works, one perceives a tendency toward simplification and a gradual reduction of descriptive elements, anticipating her later abstract developments.

The move to Rome and the encounter with modernity

In 1935 Lazzari moved to Rome, a decisive turning point in her career. The capital offered a complex and intellectually vibrant context, shaped by rationalist architecture and increasingly open to abstract tendencies. Her interaction with architects, designers, and artists encouraged a deeper exploration of structural principles and formal autonomy.

During and after the Second World War, her painting progressively detached itself from representation. The linear element, initially a descriptive device, became an autonomous structural force. Line transformed into rhythm, measure, and spatial articulation. This transition did not occur abruptly; rather, it was the result of a gradual and coherent evolution grounded in disciplined reflection.

Maturity and critical recognition

By the 1950s and 1960s, Lazzari had fully articulated her abstract language. Her works from this period often feature monochromatic fields traversed by sequences of finely calibrated lines, generating subtle optical vibrations and controlled rhythmic tensions. The reduction of means does not imply austerity; instead, it intensifies formal concentration and expressive precision.

Although critical recognition steadily increased, Lazzari’s position remained somewhat peripheral within dominant art historical narratives, frequently centered on male protagonists. This retrospective enables a renewed assessment of her role within twentieth-century Italian art, emphasizing both her originality and her dialogue with international developments.

Theme of the exhibition

The notion of “Language” as interpretative framework

The title suggests a perspective that transcends chronological succession. “Languages” refers to a plurality of formal codes and expressive strategies through which Lazzari engaged with the transformations of twentieth-century art. Rather than adhering passively to prevailing trends, she maintained a critical dialogue with abstraction, Informal painting, and later minimalist investigations.

In Lazzari’s practice, language becomes a meditation on the very nature of painting: the surface as a field of tension, the sign as a temporal trace, the line as generative structure. Each phase of her production corresponds to a distinct modulation of these elements, continuously redefined through disciplined inquiry.

Abstraction, rhythm, and structure

The exhibition foregrounds Lazzari’s contribution to Italian abstraction. Her works resist impulsive gesturalism, instead articulating a measured and almost musical construction. Repetition and variation function as compositional principles, creating rhythmic sequences that unfold across the pictorial plane.

In many works from the 1960s and 1970s, the surface is traversed by parallel lines or delicate graphic textures that produce subtle vibratory effects. The chromatic palette is often restrained, whites, greys, blacks, and deep reds, reinforcing a contemplative spatial dimension. Lazzari’s abstraction is neither purely analytical nor emotionally detached; it preserves a lyrical quality embedded within its formal rigor.

An independent position within the twentieth century

The exhibition makes clear Lazzari’s independent stance in relation to contemporary movements. While her research resonates with aspects of European Informal art and minimalist tendencies, she maintained a deliberate distance from doctrinal affiliations. Her practice emerges as a sustained personal inquiry grounded in discipline and introspection.

The thematic focus thus positions Lazzari not merely as a witness to her era, but as an active interpreter of its artistic languages. The plurality of her approaches reflects a continuous redefinition of artistic identity rather than stylistic fragmentation.

Exhibition path

From figuration to formal synthesis

The exhibition opens with early works that document her figurative phase. Landscapes, still lifes, and decorative compositions reveal an interest in structural balance and the relationship between filled and empty spaces. These works already suggest a movement toward simplification and essential form.

This section clarifies that abstraction was not a rupture but the culmination of a gradual transformation. Figuration progressively dissolves, giving way to increasingly essential structures.

The postwar years and the emergence of abstraction

The central section focuses on the postwar period, when Lazzari more decisively articulated her abstract identity. The line becomes the fundamental element of her language, no longer descriptive, but structural and autonomous.

Sign and surface

In numerous works on canvas and paper, sequences of lines organize the pictorial space into fields of controlled vibration. The painted surface becomes an active site of tension, rather than a neutral support. The economy of means intensifies the viewer’s attention to the relationship between sign and ground.

Materials and experimentation

Alongside paintings, works on paper reveal sustained technical experimentation. Pencil, ink, and tempera are employed with precision, each material selected for its specific expressive potential. Despite variations in medium, a coherent formal discipline unifies the production.

Mature phase: minimalism and lyrical intensity

The final section is devoted to the mature works, where formal reduction reaches its highest level of synthesis. Thin lines traverse monochromatic expanses, creating compositions that evoke meditative introspection.

Line as writing

Here, line assumes the value of a personal script. It neither describes nor represents, but records an inner movement. Repetition becomes an investigative method, while subtle variation introduces dynamic tension within apparent stillness.

Space as mental experience

Pictorial space is conceived not as illusionistic depth but as a mental field. The absence of traditional perspective concentrates attention on the surface, inviting slow and analytical viewing. Lazzari’s paintings demand time, time for observation and for perceiving the smallest differences.

Why visit the exhibition

Critical reappraisal of italian modern Art

This exhibition offers an essential opportunity to reconsider the development of modern and contemporary art in Italy through the lens of an artist who pursued her research with coherence and independence. The reconstruction of her trajectory enriches the understanding of Italian abstraction and contributes to a broader reassessment of women’s contributions to twentieth-century art history.

Experience of discipline and contemplation

Visiting the exhibiton means engaging with a conception of painting grounded in rigor, discipline, and introspection. The works resist spectacle and instead foster attentive and reflective viewing, encouraging meditation on the meaning of sign and form.

Enduring relevance of a personal inquiry

In a century marked by rapid shifts and successive avant-gardes, Lazzari chose a path of concentration and subtraction. This sustained commitment to essential form grants her work a striking contemporary resonance. Within the institutional framework of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the retrospective assumes particular significance, contributing to the redefinition of the canon of twentieth-century Italian art and affirming the enduring vitality of abstract languages.

L'articolo Bice Lazzari. The Languages of her time proviene da ArcheoRoma.

Through a carefully articulated curatorial vision, the project proposes a renewed reading of the contemporary metropolis, emphasizing the city’s capacity to generate narratives, images, and conflicts that resonate far beyond its geographical boundaries. The exhibition does not indulge in celebratory rhetoric, but rather adopts a lucid and analytical gaze, acknowledging Rome’s contradictions and fragilities. In doing so, it invites the public to engage with the city as a shared space of responsibility, imagination, and care, where the act of “embracing” becomes a metaphor for critical attention and civic consciousness.

Concept of the exhibition

At the core of Cara Città (abbracciami) lies a reflection on the city as a body, social, political, and emotional, constantly shaped by those who inhabit it. The exhibition title suggests an intimate, almost confessional relationship with Rome, invoking affection while implicitly acknowledging distance, fatigue, and disillusionment. This ambivalence becomes a guiding principle of the project, which explores the city as a space of coexistence between beauty and neglect, memory and erasure, belonging and exclusion.

Rome as a contemporary condition

Rather than presenting Rome as a historical backdrop or an immutable icon, the exhibition approaches the city as a contemporary condition. Artists are invited to respond to Rome as it exists today: a city marked by demographic change, political inertia, environmental vulnerability, and cultural resilience. The urban landscape is thus interpreted as a field of forces where personal biographies intersect with collective histories, and where artistic practice becomes a tool for investigation and critique.

Affective geographies and urban narratives

A significant thematic thread of the exhibition concerns the notion of affective geography. Works on display trace emotional maps of the city, revealing how places accumulate meaning through lived experience. Streets, peripheral neighborhoods, monuments, and forgotten spaces are reimagined as sites of attachment, loss, and resistance. The exhibition foregrounds the idea that the city is not only built through architecture and planning, but also through emotions, memories, and daily gestures.

Artists, practices and perspectives

The exhibition brings together a diverse selection of artists whose practices engage with urban reality through different media and conceptual approaches. Painting, photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performative practices coexist within a unified curatorial framework that emphasizes dialogue rather than stylistic coherence. This plurality reflects the complexity of the city itself, resisting any singular or reductive interpretation.

Artistic voices and urban engagement

Participating artists approach Rome from both internal and external perspectives, combining personal involvement with analytical distance. Some works stem from long-term research projects rooted in specific urban contexts, while others adopt a more symbolic or speculative stance. What unites these contributions is a shared attention to the city as a space of negotiation, where individual agency confronts structural constraints.

Memory, identity, and social dynamics

Several works address the role of memory in shaping urban identity, examining how collective narratives are constructed, transmitted, or suppressed. These artistic interventions highlight the tension between official histories and marginal stories, revealing the mechanisms through which certain voices are amplified while others remain invisible. The city is thus presented as a contested archive, constantly rewritten through social dynamics and power relations.

Critical art as civic practice

Within the exhibition, contemporary art is understood not as an autonomous aesthetic domain, but as a form of civic practice. The works do not offer solutions, but rather articulate questions, doubts, and critical positions. By doing so, they encourage viewers to reconsider their own role within the urban fabric, fostering an awareness of shared responsibility toward the spaces we inhabit.

Exhibition pat

MACRO reopens to the public with an exhibition season entirely dedicated to Rome, its artistic scene, and the creative energies that animate the city. Conceived by Artistic Director Cristiana Perrella, the programme envisions the museum as a living, porous, and responsive organism, one that reflects the city’s rhythms, contradictions, and transformative potential.

The season unfolds as a multidisciplinary narrative intertwining visual art, music, architecture, cinema, and performance, portraying Rome as an open laboratory shaped by both historical depth and grassroots cultural production. Past and future, institutional spaces and independent initiatives, local experiences and international dialogues converge in a shared reflection on the contemporary city.

The opening of the season is marked byfour exhibitions, inaugurated simultaneously on 11 December 2025, which together form a collective and stratified portrait of Rome through diverse artistic languages and perspectives:

UNAROMA (11 December 2025 – 6 April 2026), curated by Cristiana Perrella and Luca Lo Pinto, is a large-scale group exhibition featuring over seventy artists. Structured in three interconnected phasesf, Set, Live, and Off, the project offers a dynamic, intergenerational image of Rome’s vibrant and hybrid artistic ecosystem, expanding beyond the museum through collaborations with independent spaces across the city.

One Day You’ll Understand. 25 Years of Dissonanze (11 December 2025 – 22 March 2026), curated by Cristiana Perrella, revisits the influential Dissonanze festival, which between 2000 and 2010 positioned Rome as an international hub for electronic music, digital culture, and experimental art. Through extensive visual and sound archives, the exhibition reconstructs a pioneering moment in the city’s recent cultural history.

Jonathas de Andrade. Sorelle senza nome (11 December 2025 – 6 April 2026), curated by Cristiana Perrella, presents a newly commissioned video work by the Brazilian artist. Drawing on archival research and testimonies, the film recounts the story of a community of Brazilian nuns who, after breaking with religious vows in the 1960s, relocated to Rome under threat from the military dictatorship, continuing their political and social engagement as laywomen.

Abitare le rovine del presente (11 December 2025 – 22 March 2026), curated by Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito (Stalker), focuses on contemporary forms of dwelling and social housing in Rome. Developed from the Agency for Better Living project presented at the 2025 Architecture Biennale, the exhibition examines bottom-up practices of reuse, resilience, and regeneration in response to current environmental and social crises.

Together, these four exhibitions articulate a multifaceted reflection on Rome as a city in constant transformation, positioning MACRO as a platform for critical inquiry, cultural exchange, and collective experience.

Why visit the exhibition

Visiting the exhibition offers an opportunity to engage with Rome beyond conventional narratives. The exhibition provides a rigorous and nuanced framework for understanding the city as a contemporary phenomenon, addressing its contradictions with intellectual clarity and emotional depth. It appeals not only to art specialists, but also to anyone interested in urban culture, social transformation, and the role of artistic practice within public discourse.

Critical encounter with Rome

The exhibition encourages visitors to adopt a reflective stance toward the city, fostering a form of attentive observation that resists nostalgia and simplification. By presenting Rome as a shared and vulnerable space, the project calls for renewed forms of engagement grounded in awareness and responsibility.

Art as a tool for understanding the present

Ultimately, the exhibition demonstrates how contemporary art can function as a tool for understanding the present. Through diverse artistic languages and critical perspectives, Cara Città (abbracciami) articulates a compelling inquiry into the meaning of living in, with, and for the city today.

L'articolo Cara Città (abbracciami) at MACRO proviene da ArcheoRoma.