Ponti

The magnetic force of the Alps meets the pulsating energy of the great nineteenth-century cities to guide the virtuous brush of Giovanni Segantini, the “mountain bear” with an impetuous and poetic character at the same time, towards the deepest and most bewitching paths of beauty.
It happens on Sky thanks to the documentary Segantini – Back to nature, where Filippo Timi gives voice and face to the painter from Arco.
This and much more in the week on TV that has just begun.

Giovanni Segantini, The two mothers, 1889, Milan, GAM (Gallery of Modern Art)

Sky Arte celebrates ten years with a hidden Renaissance
Thursday 24 November a double appointment accompanies the Sky public in the footsteps of two great masters. At 13.05 Segantini – Back to nature pays homage to one of the most illustrious painters of the Italian nineteenth century, in constant oscillation between divisionism and symbolism.
Directed by Francesco Fei, with Gioconda Segantini, Annie-Paule Quinsac, Franco Marrocco, Romano Turrini and with the special participation of Filippo Timi, the docu-film reveals the singular and extraordinary story of the eccentric master and his innate ability to feel the nature as a source of artistic and spiritual inspiration.
The small screen invites you to catch new details of works such as The girl who knits the stocking of the Kunsthaus Zurich, The two mothers, Noon in the Alps and the famous Triptych of Nature of St. Moritz, and still to travel the streets, villages, valleys and alpine landscapes that marked the work and soul of an artist capable of bewitching even Vasilij Kandinskij.

Paolo Uccello protagonist of The Great Masters broadcast on Sky | Courtesy Sky

It is enough to stay on Sky Arte to make a time leap of four centuries, face to face with the one who is considered the predecessor of Piero della Francesca. At 21.15 “Grandi Maestri”, the Sky Arte series dedicated to painting that tells the life of famous artists through their masterpieces, takes us into the art of Paolo Uccello, a virtuoso of perspective, one of the many tools with which he created his representation of the world, poised between exception and rule, disorder and order.
The art historians Gaia Ravalli and Andrea De Marchi will talk about the painter of the generation of Masaccio and Brunelleschi, commenting on the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the Chapel of the Assumption in the Cathedral of Prato and exploring numerous tables exhibited in the largest museums in the world.

Sunday 27 November a special anniversary bursts onto the small screen. With over 250 original productions and over 600 hours made, in ten years Sky Arte has promoted and valorised 50 Italian cities and 380 places of artistic interest, over 450 cultural events and more than 150 national artists. And on the air it celebrates with a spearhead: the Sky Original production exclusively on Sky Arte, Sunday at 21.15, streaming only on NOW and also available on demand, which leads the public to discover the African presence in art.

The hidden Renaissance. African presences in art | Courtesy Sky

Starting from the portraits of the most famous Afro-descendant, the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, passing through the representations of people reduced to slavery or of illustrious African ambassadors, up to the portraits of gondoliers, knights, religious, swindlers – fabric of Renaissance society – the documentary tries to trace interesting identity stories by leafing through works and documents. Just dive into the frescoes by Sandro Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel to notice Ethiopian dignitaries visiting the Pope, or observe the sacred representations of Filippino Lippi, Mantegna and Ghirlandaio in the rooms of the Uffizi, to identify subjects of color, inspired by people met in everyone’s life the days. Even the paintings of Carpaccio and Veronese in Venice, Titian, Pontormo, Michelangelo and Vasari return faces of characters whose names are preserved in historical archives that speak of dates, events, testimonies of the most diverse experiences.
Conceived and written by Francesca Priori and directed by Cristian Di Mattia, the documentary brings together for the first time an international team of experts who shed light on the lives of African and Afro-descendant people who lived in the Renaissance, reconstructing their identity and their role in the society, revealing an aspect of this extraordinary era that has hitherto remained hidden.
The historical reconstructions are enriched by the animated illustrations created by TIWI. The narration is accompanied by the original soundtrack composed by Alain Diamond and Victor Kwality, which combines Renaissance themes, traditional African instrumentation and electronic sounds.

Art Rider in the Marches, from Montelabate to Pergola | Courtesy Rai 5

With Art Rider to discover the hidden Brands
Adventure on Rai 5 rhymes with Art Rider. Wednesday 23 November at 21.15 the fourth episode of the format which delves into the lesser-known art places in Italy, conducted by the young archaeologist Andrea Angelucci and produced by GA&A Productions, in collaboration with Rai Cultura, stops in the Marche, leafing through a itinerary on the border between the northern Marches and Umbria and which will restore the value of the patronage in art. What drives great personalities to commission artists to create great masterpieces? Wednesday’s episode will be a journey to discover the artistic heritage linked to the war fought by lords and lords, among masterpieces, fortresses, soldiers of fortune. Directed by Francesco Principini and texts by Paolo Fazzini and Chiara Vannoni and by Andrea Angelucci himself, the episode will touch on various locations, sometimes unexplored or shrouded in legends.

On Arte tv Albrecht Dürer and the mystery of self-portraits
At the age of 13, with the help of a convex mirror, Albrecht Dürer made his first self-portrait. On the other hand, the artist born in 1471 in Nuremberg, the “heart” of the Holy Roman Empire, also went down in history for his very precocious talent. At the age of fifteen he had the courage to leave his father’s goldsmith’s workshop to enter the studio of the painter Michael Wolgemut. It will be the young Dürer’s passion for engraving, a technique developed fifty years earlier, that will favor the diffusion of his works, while long stays in Basel and Venice allow him to study perspective and the masters of the fifteenth century.
On Arte TV the film Albrecht Dürer: the mystery of self-portraits, following 12 innovative masterpieces of the painter as a common thread, he traces his career by celebrating his genius.

Read also:
• The other Segantini. Previews from a major exhibition

Milan – Dreamlike, visionary, imaginative, Jheronimus Bosch is known in every corner of the globe and his fame goes far beyond the confines of the art world. Yet the works that are unanimously attributed to him are very few, and bringing them together in one place has so far been an almost impossible undertaking. The organizers of the great exhibition presented today at Palazzo Reale have succeeded, curated by Bernard Aikema, former professor of Modern Art History at the University of Verona, Fernando Checa Cremades, professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid and former director of the Prado Museum, and Claudio Salsi, director of Castello Sforzesco, Archaeological Museums and Historical Museums, as well as professor of the history of engraving at the Catholic University of Milan. To transform the project into reality it took five years and an impressive work of research and international cultural cooperation, the result of the joint efforts of the Municipality of Milan-Culture, Palazzo Reale and Castello Sforzesco with 24 Ore Cultura. The result is “a unique exhibition for the power of the story of an entire artistic era and for the importance and variety of the comparisons” presented, explain the organizers.

Jheronimus Bosch, Triptych of the Temptations of Saint Anthony, around 1500. Oil on the table. Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga © DGPC/Luísa Oliveira

From 9 November to 12 March 2023, around 100 works will trace the portrait of a singular and mysterious artist, on whom experts have never stopped debating, and of the passions he has managed to ignite from the sixteenth century to today, influencing great masters, attracting prestigious collectors and giving life to a widespread taste that authorizes us to speak of a real “Bosch phenomenon”. The fascinating thesis of the curators is that the Flemish painter, so different from the other great European artists of his time, is the emblem of an “alternative” Renaissance, light years away from the humanist and classicist ideals of the fifteenth century, and therefore proof of the existence of a plurality of Renaissances, each with its own characteristics and its own center of gravity. Another founding hypothesis is the idea that the “Bosch phenomenon” was not born in Flanders, the artist’s homeland, but in the Mediterranean world, and precisely between Spain and Italy in the sixteenth century.

Workshop of Jheronimus Bosch, The Vision of Tundalo, circa 1490-1525. Oil on the table. Madrid, Lázaro Galdiano Museum © Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid

Precisely for this reason, the Milanese exhibition is not a traditional monograph, but a fluid dialogue between the works of Bosch and those of Flemish, Italian and Spanish masters, which highlight how “the other Renaissance” subsequently influenced artists of different backgrounds, from Titian to Raphael, from Gerolamo Savoldo to El Greco. Along the way we find paintings, sculptures and engravings, but also tapestries, ancient volumes and rare objects from the wunderkammer of wealthy collectors. Among Bosch’s masterpieces, the monumental stands out Triptych of the Temptations of St. Anthony from the Museu Nacional d’Arte Antiga in Lisbon, never exhibited in Italy, which in the course of the twentieth century left Portugal only twice, while the Triptych of the Final Judgment, formerly in the collections of the Venetian cardinal Marino Grimani. Other extraordinary loans have come from the Prado Museum, from and from the Làzaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice.

Jheronimus Bosch, The Temptations of Saint Anthony, circa 1500. Oil on the table. Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga © DGPC/Luísa Oliveira

Unprecedented is the exhibition of the entire cycle of tapestries taken from the works of Bosch, which for the first time combines the four pieces of the Escorial Monastery and the cartoon of the fifth tapestry now lost, preserved in the collections of the Uffizi Galleries: objects precious works of art, authentic status symbols in sixteenth-century Europe, which today bear witness to the success of the Flemish artist among the leaders of the aristocracy of the time.

Copy after Jheronimus Bosch, Scene with elephant, 16th century. Oil painting on canvas. Florence, Uffizi Galleries © Photographic Department of the Uffizi Galleries

Engravings, starting with those of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were instead the main medium through which Bosch’s fantastic and nocturnal imagery traveled across the continent, and even across the Atlantic. Finally, in the courts of the 16th and 17th centuries, the bizarre taste of the Flemish artist harmonized perfectly with the spirit of the wunderkammer: we’ll find out in the last room of Bosch and another Renaissanceset up just like a chamber of curiosities, where rare and precious objects evoke the atmospheres of Bosch’s most famous masterpiece, the Triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights.

Manufacture of Brussels, The Garden of Earthly Delights, circa 1550-1570. Tapestry. Madrid, Patrimonio Nacional, Palacio Real © Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid

Pisa – A new painting by Artemisia Gentileschi enters the Italian museum heritage: it is the large canvas of Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, among the rare works signed by the seventeenth-century painter and documented since their creation. From today until Sunday 20 November, the painting will be visible free of charge at Blue Palace, after which it will become part of the permanent itinerary of the Pisan museum. Purchased by the Pisa Foundation in spring 2022, the canvas underwent a complete restoration, which returned it to its original appearance and made it possible to study Gentileschi’s modus operandi through non-invasive diagnostic investigations.

Christ and the Samaritan woman it is the work of an artistically mature Artemisia, created in Naples between 1636 and 1637. The painter faithfully reproduces the story of the Gospel of John, reinterpreting with excited participation the realism imposed in painting by Caravaggio a few years earlier. In the background are the disciples returning from the city where they had gone to buy supplies, while the figures of Jesus and the Samaritan woman emerge in the foreground. Although immersed in a supernatural aura, Christ has a sweet expression as he pronounces words that sound like an enigma: “Whoever drinks this water will be thirsty again – he says – but whoever drinks the water that I will give him will not will be thirsty forever. Indeed, the water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life”. Surprised, confused, fascinated like the Samaritan woman in the painting, the artist invites the viewer to understand and adopt the master’s message.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1636 – 1637), Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well, 1636-37. Oil on canvas I Courtesy Palazzo Blu

“A little less than two years ago, a friend told us of the presence in a Sicilian noble family of a large canvas by Artemisia which represents the encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well” says the president of the Palazzo Blue Cosimo Bracci Torsi: “The work of a sacred subject, by an Artemisia different from the somewhat truculent proto-feminist with the Judiths, the Lucretias and the Cleopatra which has recently come into fashion, immediately appeared to be of great interest and extraordinary quality”.
Identified in 2004 by Luciano Arcangeli and exhibited to the public for the first time in 2012 in Milan in the great exhibition dedicated to the artist at Palazzo Reale, the Palazzo Blu canvas can boast “an extraordinary collector’s pedigree”, as the historian of the Artemisia art and expert Francesco Solinas of the Collège de France in Paris. It was Gentileschi herself who described the painting in detail, including dimensions, in two letters dated autumn 1637 addressed to Cavalier Cassiano dal Pozzo, his illustrious admirer and protector at the court of Rome. Through the Knight, the artist offered the Samaritan woman to the cardinal brothers Francesco and Antonio Barberini, nephews of the reigning Pope Urban VIII. The Barberinis never bought the painting, which was probably sold only after the artist’s return from London, in the spring of 1641. After passing through the Neapolitan and Sicilian collections of the noble Ruffos, the painting reached Palermo before 1680, entering the prestigious collection of the Duke of Sperlinga and his heirs, where it remained until the 20th century.
Today it enriches the rich nucleus of works by the Gentileschis conserved in Palazzo Blu, which already includes several paintings by the brothers Aurelio and Baccio, mainly active in Pisa, the Madonna and Child with Saints from Horace and the Muse Clio of Artemisia, acquired in 2004 in an auction in the London branch of Christie’s, as well as the Portrait of Artemisia by Simon Vouet.

Signature of the work ‘A’ by Artemisia Gentileschi, revealed by the restoration carried out in Pisa I Courtesy Palazzo Blu

Research conducted on Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well – reveals the restorer and expert of Artemisia Cinzia Pasquali, consultant for the intervention on the painting – have brought to light “details of great interest: the nature of some substances and pigments, the pentimenti and compositional shifts (both in the preparatory and pictorial phases), the nature of the layers used as a base chromatic, old restorations as well as other particular signs invisible to the naked eye”. Before carrying out the painting, Artemisia prepared the canvas with natural glue on which a colored sizing was applied. Like other painters of her time, in fact, Gentileschi often used brown backgrounds before painting, a fact evident in theAllegory of Painting conserved in London at the Royal Collection. It is also possible to hypothesize that the artist used a preparatory drawing in plaster, a material clearly visible against the dark background.

Thanks to infrared reflectography, we know that Artemisia modified the positions of Christ’s left hand and the Samaritan woman’s left arm during the work. Even the woman’s face underwent several changes: “from the position of the eyes, which suggested a less angled head, to the shape of the hair which fell more in front of her face, just as some folds of Christ’s cloak appear eliminated or simplified in the final version ”, says the restorer. We owe the discovery of another unexpected detail to reflectographic analyses: “an inverted U-shaped laceration located on the upper edge of the well between Christ and the Samaritan woman – continues Pasquali – which appears to have been stitched ab antiquo with a thread of the same cloth”. In all likelihood it would not be a restoration, but a repair made by Artemisia herself on a tear that accidentally occurred in the workshop. The pictorial material that covers the laceration is in fact identical to that of the rest of the work. Finally, a precious gift arrived from the cleaning of the painting which, free from the waste of time and subsequent repaintings, revealed Gentileschi’s signature and definitively confirmed the attribution.