Ponti

Questa immagine ridicola non può che farti ridere. Nel 1663, in Germania fu scoperto lo scheletro fossile parziale di un rinoceronte lanoso… che alla fine portò alla creatura che vedi sotto. Questo è l'”Unicorno di Magdeburgo”, la peggiore ricostruzione fossile della storia umana.

Lo scienziato prussiano Otto von Geuricke è l’uomo dietro questa ridicola esibizione di ossa. Nel 1663 trovò alcuni resti ossei di un rinoceronte lanoso, una specie ormai estinta che un tempo vagava per gran parte dell’Eurasia settentrionale, fino alla fine dell’ultima era glaciale.

In realtà credeva che la collezione di ossa fossilizzate appartenesse a un unicorno. Circa cinque anni dopo la loro scoperta, Otto von Geuricke ricostruì le ossa nella forma in cui sono rappresentate oggi. Attualmente l’unicorno è conservato al Museum für Naturkunde di Magdeburgo, in Germania.

h/t: triste e inutile

Il corno è molto probabilmente la zanna di un narvalo, una balena di medie dimensioni che vive nelle acque artiche intorno alla Groenlandia, al Canada e alla Russia. Il canino superiore sinistro dei maschi del narvalo forma una lunga zanna attorcigliata a spirale con una lunghezza fino a più di 3 m (10 piedi in unità di misura di libertà). Il teschio dell’unicorno sembra un teschio fossile di un rinoceronte lanoso e le scapole e le ossa delle due zampe anteriori provengono dal mammut lanoso estinto.

L’unicorno, una creatura mitica resa popolare nel folklore europeo, ha affascinato l’immaginazione umana per oltre 2000 anni. Per la maggior parte di quel tempo, fino al Medioevo, anche la gente credeva che fossero reali. Le radici del mito dell’unicorno risalgono almeno al 400 a.C., quando lo storico greco Ctesia documentò per la prima volta un animale simile a un unicorno nei suoi scritti sull’India. Questi primi resoconti descrivono l’unicorno come feroce, veloce e impossibile da catturare, con un corno magico in grado di curare numerosi disturbi. Durante il Medioevo, le immagini e le descrizioni dell’unicorno erano comunemente incluse nei bestiari medievali e l’unicorno divenne un motivo popolare nell’arte medievale. Chissà, forse anche al giorno d’oggi ci sono persone che credono negli unicorni. Dopotutto abbiamo dei credenti della Terra piatta, quindi perché non gli unicorni?

“The works of Phidias are real flesh that is beautiful nature”. Antonio Canova was convinced that he had condensed all his deepest admiration for the Athenian sculptor in this sentence, in admiring closely, during a visit to London, in November 1815, those “Large figures, in which the artist could show his true knowledge”.
Now, on the occasion of the second centenary of the death of the sculptor from Possagno (13 October 1822), Villa Carlotta celebrates the legacy of one of the greatest masters of all time who transformed the very idea of ​​sculpture and its technique through immortal masterpieces that have become popular and reproduced all over the world.

From 24th September to 11th December the exhibition Canova, new Phidiascurated by Gianfranco Adornato, Maria Angela Previtera and Elena Lissoni, ready to inaugurate in the suggestive Villa di Tremezzo, on the shores of Lake Como, will put in dialogue the artistic poetics of Canova with that of Phidias of Athens, his “alter ego” of antiquity.

Antonio Canova, Palamede, 1796-1805, marble, Tremezzina, Villa Carlotta, Museum and Botanical Garden

The public will be invited to embark on an unprecedented journey listening to the whispers among the museum’s Canovian works and important archaeological finds on loan from major Italian museums. The Torso of the wounded Amazon of the collections of the Royal Museums of Turin, the only version in the world in basanite, will dialogue with the original plaster of the Muse Terpsichore by Antonio Canova from the collections of Villa Carlotta, while the subject of the Amazon can also be appreciated in the form of a herm from the famous Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, now a treasure of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, and in a miniature version in bronze coming from the National Archaeological Museum of Florence.

Torso of a wounded Amazon, Roman copy, 2nd cent. AD, green basanite, Royal Museums of Turin, Museum of Antiquities, inv. 284. With the concession of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism – Royal Museums

On display it will be possible to trace the famous Fidian statue in gold and ivory that stood in his temple in Olympia, considered the fourth wonder of the world, through one of only two ancient coins surviving to this day, dating back to the last years of Hadrian’s reign.
The dialogue between Fidia and Canova will reach its peak through the confrontation between the Head of Apollo of the Archaeological Museum of Naples and the Palamede canoviano, a symbolic work of Villa Carlotta. The itinerary is also enriched with some casts of the Parthenon sculptures from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, with which Canova had intertwined a fruitful dialogue.
It was precisely the intervention of the sculptor from Possagno to ensure that the marbles, transported by Lord Elgin from Athens to London, finally had a paternity and a place of first order in the history of ancient, modern and contemporary art.

Head of Apollo of the Kassel type, Roman copy of the imperial age from a Greek original of the classical age – from 460 to 450 BC (original), 2nd cent. AD (copy), marble. MANN, National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Inv. 6. By permission of the Ministry of Culture – National Archaeological Museum of Naples | Photo: © Giorgio Albano

The visit to the exhibition is included in the entrance ticket to Villa Carlotta, open from Monday to Sunday, from 10am to 7pm (the ticket office closes at 6pm and the museum closes at 6.30pm). From 7 November to 11 December, during the closure of the Villa to the public, it will be possible to visit the exhibition by booking by writing to [email protected].

Read also:
• The other face of Canova, the European genius who taught the world about hope

World – There is the country road along the Ofanto, invaded by the sun, and the Gulf of Naples all a reflection. And then the Westminster district shrouded in clouds, a winter walk, a train crossing or even the portrait of Edgar Degas, springs, to mark the human and artistic path of Giuseppe De Nittis, the Apulian artist ready to talk about himself in the States for his first major overseas exhibition. A backward journey that has his Puglia as its starting point.

“Everyone copies De Nittis (…) De Nittis has achieved perfection in what the Impressionists had started” wrote Gauguin at the end of 1884. Yet the Barletta painter who died prematurely at the age of 38, a central figure in the early years of Impressionism, has not always enjoyed due consideration, sometimes confined to clichés by the French and Italian artists themselves.

Giuseppe De Nittis, Campo di biche, ca 1880, Oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm, Barletta, Giuseppe De Nittis Picture Gallery

From 12 November to 12 February an exhibition entitled An italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittisrealized in concert with the Municipality of Barletta and the Puglia Region, pays homage to the great Italian artist, inviting an international reinterpretation of the master and rectifying the historical omission of which he has long been the subject.
The path will try to rediscover the figure of the painter – whose maturity sprouted through a national itinerary to consecrate himself between Paris and London, within the wider Impressionist movement – but also the incredible friendship that bound him to masters such as Manet, Degas , Caillebotte, providing a new point of view in the study of Impressionism.

The Phillips Collection, the first modern art museum in the United States, will welcome the itinerary – which promises to be the flagship international event of Washington’s fall -.
The stimulus starts with the rearrangement of the Pinacoteca De Nittis in Barletta – which preserves the large donation made in 1914 of over 136 works by Léontine, the artist’s wife – by the historian and art critic Renato Miracco, who, together to Italian and American scholars he gave life to a reinterpretation of the painter.
32 works will leave for Washington from the Pinacoteca hosted at Palazzo della Marra, in addition to the 15 masterpieces arriving from museums such as the Metropolitan in New York, the Louvre in Paris and the Petit Palais, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Art Museum of Boston, 14 works on loan from private collections and works from the Phillips Collection, for a total of 74 works on display.

Giuseppe De Nittis, Breakfast in the garden, 1884, Oil on canvas, 117 x 81 cm, Barletta, Giuseppe De Nittis Picture Gallery

“The idea of ​​this monographic, the first on American soil – explains Renato Miracco, curator of the exhibition together with Susan Behrends Frank – is based on recent research by international scholars with the precise desire to re-read Giuseppe De Nittis, a multifaceted personality, innovator, inspired by multiple artistic cultures of the moment, unknown to the general public, who became a point of reference for an entire generation of European painters. Along the reasoned path of this exhibition, divided into sections, we will be able to admire how De Nittis tackles all the typical themes of the painting of the time, from urban views to the new Parisian fashion, from the views of Vesuvius to the magical landscapes of the Apulian and French countryside “.

In this exhibition path that builds an ideal bridge between Puglia and Washington, the result of an admirable example of collaboration between private individuals and public institutions, and which required four years of work, De Nittis will dialogue with works by Degas, Manet and Caillebotte.
“But it will not be a casual comparison – assures Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips Collection -. These works will relive a new life in the contemporaneity of the exhibition “.

In the meantime, at the Pinacoteca di Barletta, the works temporarily on loan to the Phillips Collection will be replaced with as many works by De Nittis kept in the deposits.
“The great heritage of the Barletta Impressionist, donated to the city by his wife Léontine Gruvelle – explains the mayor of Barletta, Cosimo Cannito – will make it possible to rearrange the Pinacoteca in order to give the visitors of Palazzo della Marra the opportunity to appreciate the artistic grandeur of the painter who was able to enchant Paris ”.

The exhibition, which boasts the High Patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture, was born in collaboration with the Superintendence of Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of the Privincia BAT (Barletta Andria Trani) with the city of Barletta and the Pinacoteca De Nittis, with the support of the Puglia Region and the Pino Pascali Foundation in collaboration with ARET Pugliaprofotion.
A catalog in English will be dedicated to De Nittis with essays by Renato Miracco, Robert Jensen and Marina Ferretti Bocquillon.

Edgar Degas, Portrait of Mrs. De Nittis, c.1872, Oil on canvas, 55 x 74 cm, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, Gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc.