FLORENCE, ITALY – As part of the celebrations the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno has coordinated to commemorate the four-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Galleria dell’Accademia of Florence in collaboration with Fratelli Alinari I.D.E.A. S.p.A. present an exhibition that deals with the complex theme of the renewed interest and admiration for the artist from the XIX century until today.
The means for handling the topic will be the work of sculptors, painters and photographers who have looked to the figure of Buonarroti and his work as the iconographic point of reference in their own work.
The exhibition itinerary starts out with representations in a historicist vein of Michelangelo’s physiognomy and personality, featuring works by Eugène Delacroix and Auguste Rodin, as well as by other authors who worked with the then-new photographic medium from its very birth, including the early work of Eugène Piot, Édouard-Denis Baldus, the Alinari brothers, and John Brampton Philpot, to name only a few.
The exhibition will be characterized by continuously cross-referencing the various modalities of translating and proposing Buonarroti’s sculpture anew: from the photograph as an object of documentation to its interpretative specificity in focusing on sculpture, up to the total autonomy of twentieth-century photographers in creating new points of view and analysis of the work of art.
As the myth grew stronger in the collective perception, Michelangelo’s presence was also recognised in the work of twentieth-century artists such as Medardo Rosso, Henri Matisse, and Carlo Mollino, as well as in the photographic studies of personalities such as Emmanuel Sougez, Herbert List and Horst P. Horst.
His influence continued in the Seventies with the explorations of Tano Festa, Paolo Monti, Antonia Mulas, finally arriving at the expressions of contemporaneity with Helmut Newton and Gabriele Basilico.
The exhibition itinerary ends with references to the theme of the copy and of the multiple in the epoch of reproducibility and massification, confronted in the work of Karen Knorr, Lisa Sarfati and Tim Parchikov.
Promoters: Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo, Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici della Toscana, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze, Galleria dell’Accademia, Firenze Musei, Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, Fratelli Alinari I.D.E.A. S.p.A
Project design: Monica Maffioli and Silvestra Bietoletti
Exhibition Management: Angelo Tartuferi
Catalogue Giunti Editore
Ticket prices: full price € 11,00, reduced € 5,50.