The event, which opens in October (the month of birth of Alberto Giacometti – 10 October 1901) is part of the project “Arte in Agenda. A face to face with…” conceived and promoted by Palazzo Magnani Foundation of Reggio Emilia.
Through the dialogue between the two works, so distant in time yet so close in terms of expressive force, we will understand the inseparable relationship between ancient and modern art and the great fascination that the art of the past has exerted on the twentieth century avant-garde artists.
Over time, the dialogue between the Etruscan masterpiece and one of the famous femme debouts of the great Swiss artist has entered the common imagination due to the affinity that binds their long-limbed and thin shapes. However recent studies have shown that Giacometti, in his passionate study of antiquity and the classics, devoted much attention to the Etruscan world fascinated by the expressive research of its statuary and by an even more ancient origin than the elongated shape itself. An origin that dates back to prehistoric times, to an ancestral feeling, to an archetypal image of man inherited from the Etruscans and reached as far as Giacometti.
The Shadow of the Evening is one of the most emblematic and representative objects of the Etruscan people. This Etruscan bronze figure with an elongated figure preserved in the Guarnacci Museum in Volterra has always been one of the symbols of a people considered among the most mysterious in history and strongly evokes the typical Giacomettian forms.
The studies conducted by the art historian Chiara Gatti underline the affinities that linked Giacometti's research to the more remote past. In the case of the Swiss sculptor, in fact, his interest in the past is known, his assiduous reflection on the primitive art developed, since he was a boy, by copying, in the margins of his father's books, in the Stampa house, every detail from the masterpieces of other eras and other cultures (from the Egyptians to the Chaldeans, from the Fayoum to Byzantium). In one of his typewritten texts, re-emerged from the Marchiori Archive of Lendinara, the great art critic Giuseppe Marchiori defined the men of his sculptor friend Giacometti as "thin shadows printed on the trachyte pavement". He was the first to compare the Swiss artist's slender bodies to the Evening Shadow, defining them "slender like Nuragic warriors, without spears and shields, or similar to the Volterran idol, to the men of the night".
Alongside the prestigious exhibitions that the Palazzo Magnani Foundation will bring to Reggio Emilia (the great retrospective on Escher is imminent), “Arte on the agenda. A face to face with…” accompanies us on a journey through the history of art through single works and among the most significant personalities of all time.
In 2011 it was the turn of Andy Warhol, The last supper together with a drawing of Leonardo's Last Supper by Francesco Hayez and in 2012 by Pablo Picasso, Femme sur une feuteuil, Buste 1962.
In this path Arte in agenda leads the visitor to retrace the poetics of the artists, the soul of certain creative elaborations and pieces of art history that can be useful tools for reflection on today. In fact, works of art - ancient, modern or contemporary - have never looked at man from the heights of their creative processes, but have always played the role of a faithful mirror of the life and history in which they were born, within of constant evolutionary processes, sometimes linear, but more often intertwined, complex or even cyclical. For this reason, each creation is never the only child of its time, but has a wider value. In fact, it can contain references, elements of contact or break with what was previously elaborated and at the same time it can offer important ideas that will be the object of investigation for future languages.
As part of the third edition of Arte on the agenda, the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia will present "The Return of the Warrior" from 28 September to 27 October 2013 in the Atrium of the Civic Museums.
150 years later, he returns to the city where a bronze statuette known to archaeologists as the "Warrior of Reggio Emilia" had been purchased, kept in the Etruscan-Italic collection of the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna. We owe the possibility of an event which, together with the Palazzo Magnani initiative, offers Reggio Emilia an early autumn dedicated to the Etruscans.
"The warrior", a praying man whose large palms seem to allude to a devotion to the gods dwelling in the dark and hopeless territories of the subsoil, is portrayed without clothing and at the same time flaunts a crested helmet, in Villanovan style, which certainly marks his high status, not as a simple warrior, but as a leader. The hypothesis of origin from the Reggio Emilia area would make it the most ancient evidence (end of the XNUMXth – beginning of the XNUMXth century BC) of the Etruscan or Etruscan presence in Reggio Emilia.
The project, carried out in collaboration with the Guarnacci Museum of Volterra and the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, is curated by Chiara Gatti and accompanied by writings by Fabrizio Burchianti, Director of the Etruscan Museum of Volterra and Roberto Macellari Inspector archaeologist of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia.
The event will also continue at the Guarnacci Etruscan Museum in Volterra from 26 October to 3 November 2013.
