The events deserve to be presented well in advance: The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer's masterpiece, made famous by the 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson, will arrive in Bologna in February next year and the public will be able to admire this splendid, small painting at Palazzo Fava from 8 February to 25 May 2014. The Mona Lisa of Holland will be exhibited in an exhibition dedicated to the Golden Age of Dutch painting, curated by Marco Goldin, of Linea d'ombra and by Emilie Gordenker, director of the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague where Vermeer's masterpiece is kept.
There is time to catch your breath and to book, perhaps even too much, but for a city that is almost always excluded from the circuit of large
exhibitions, this is really a big deal. To score it is the president of the Carisbo Foundation, Fabio Roversi Monaco who, with his mandate expiring, ends his experience with a touch of class. The exhibition is the result of long negotiations and fortunate circumstances: the Dutch museum is closed for restoration and is therefore taking an important part of its masterpieces around the world; the magician of large exhibitions, Goldin, on the other hand, has excellent relations with Dutch museums and with professor Roversi Monaco and so Bologna was chosen as the only European stop on the Girl's tour, before returning to The Hague for a long time maybe forever.
“It was two months of close and complex negotiations – explains Goldin – because a masterpiece of this kind only moves once
in life. So this show was now or never." Goldin has chosen not to reproduce in Bologna the identical exhibitions which, thanks to the availability of the Mauritshuis Museum, have been or will be staged in Japan, in Tokyo and Kobe and in the USA, in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York. In the Emilian capital there will be more paintings, about forty, to get to know seventeenth-century Dutch painting: two by the master of light, in addition to the Girl with a turban (another name by which the painting is known), also Diana and her Nymphs and there there will also be 4 paintings by Rembrandt and again Hals, Ter Borch, Van Goyen and many others: “the entire century – underlines the curator – will be retraced”.
Satisfied with Roversi Monaco, for a choice that enhances its work and also the city: "it will offer many tourists the opportunity to
visit Bologna – he observes – and a collateral exhibition on the Bolognese seventeenth century is also being studied, aimed at promoting a journey
dialectic with the great seventeenth century Dutch”. Palazzo Fava, site of the exhibition, boasts among other things the beautiful frescoes by the Carracci.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a tribute by 15 contemporary artists to Vermeer, from Guccione to Sarnari, from Olivieri to Verna.
However, she will be the diva of this event: this delightful young girl from four centuries ago, seen from three quarters, in her languid pose and
bewitching. At least two novels have been dedicated to her mystery in recent years: The girl with a turban ”by Marta Morazzoni and The girl with a pearl earring, by Tracy Chevalier, which became a successful film in 2003.
