It is a nucleus of very specific works by Strazza, which he mainly dedicated to the geometries of the Cosmati, the highly skilled Roman marble workers who in the first two centuries after the year XNUMX embellished churches and palaces with works of absolute mastery, drawing on more ancient Venetian Byzantine models .
"In this exhibition, a great artist and a great collector are united, after a century, by two factors common to both: patronage and a passion for ancient marbles", underlines Claudia Cremonini, Director of the Cà d'Oro and co-curator of the exhibition.
Franchetti ventured directly into one of the symbolic buildings of Venice, the Ca 'd'Oro, which he bought and donated to the State in 1916. Strazza was attracted by the mosaic floors of the Roman basilicas during the years of the Second World War.
Reality, symbol and abstraction merge, combined by the passion for precious stones, fiercely collected by Giorgio Franchetti, between Rome and Florence and lovingly reassembled by him on the floor of the Ca d'Oro; contemplated, copied by Strazza in difficult years, of lost harmony, and reworked decades later, between the seventies and eighties: colored geometries resurfacing in memory and from the soul.
Strazza's interest in the Cosmati stems from that incunabulum of inspiration which was Futurism: which he met under the guidance of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
The porphyry wheels with the circular bands must have been familiar to an aeropainter who really was an aviation pilot. Reflections on movement, space and light, the relationship with the other arts, especially music, would always be at the center of Strazza's reflection, of his signs, both pictorial and graphic, and start from that youthful and very precocious experience.
“With Guido Strazza for the Ca' d'Oro – underlines Daniela Ferrara, Director of the Polo Museale Veneto and co-curator of the Exhibition – a genuine relationship between ancient art and modern art is proposed to the public. A sincere love relationship between the architectural icon, already updated by Giorgio Franchetti at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the work of Guido Strazza, in its ideal and modern continuation of timeless thoughts”.
On the occasion of the exhibition of the prestigious corpus of works by Guido Strazza, Claudia Cremonini has decided to offer the public, in an evocative dialogue between ancient and contemporary works, a nucleus of testimonies of the early medieval master stonecutters, patrimony of the Venetian Museum. Not only the famous Cosmatesque floors, then. But also, in direct and formally stringent relationship with some pieces of the donation, stone fragments, ceramics, architectural elements of the Ca d'Oro itself, or inserted in it by Baron Franchetti, which, in their majority, have never been exposed to the public .
“The exhibition – emphasizes the Director of the Gallery – makes evident the assonance between the production exhibited here by Strazza, the "Segni di Roma", and the "Pietre di Venezia" of the Ca' d'Oro and, in particular, with two of the marvels designed for it by Franchetti: the Mantegna Chapel, covered with precious veined marble, and the mosaic floor of the atrium. To reaffirm the dialectical relationship between the original model and the creation of new works of which Ca' d'Oro itself is testimony today”.
