The exhibition is a real stratified journey between classic and modern, between past and present, curated by Barnaba Fornasetti, Artistic Director of the Milanese Atelier, by Valeria Manzi, co-curator of cultural activities and President of the association Fornasetti Cult, and of the director of the Monumental Complex of the Pilotta Simone Verde, with the intention of regenerating the classical heritage and classicism of the autonomous Parma museum institution, through the intellectual recovery that has made it one of the undisputed masters of contemporary design.
"Fornasetti Theatrum Mundi” brings Pilotta's architecture and works into dialogue with the imagination of Piero and Barnaba Fornasetti, creating a real 'theater of the world': a network of iconographic references and cultural suggestions che reveals the intellectual statute of the objects on display and the images on display, making their depth visible and offering universal and exciting implications. A real "Theatrum" in the sixteenth-century meaning, therefore, which declines in the infinite variety of the world the encyclopaedic unity of knowledge to which classicism aspired, both Renaissance and eighteenth-century and - thanks to Fornasetti's playful key - also contemporary .
The exhibition itinerary is divided into nuclei linked to the main themes of Fornasetti's work: ruins and the use of the past as a fragment, architecture, music, theme and variations, drawing, graphics, collecting, the everyday object and the illusionistic and dreamlike dimension.
The exhibition begins its journey with the 21 showcases located inside the Petitot Gallery of the Palatine Library. After admiring the enfilade of the Galleria dell'Incoronata, enter the heart of the Farnese theater, a masterpiece of seventeenth-century architecture built in the complex on the model of the classical theater, the same architectural structure from which the idea of the Theatrum Mundi was born formulated by the Neoplatonist rhetorician Giulio Camillo (1480-1544). Camillo's utopia placed figures and symbols within the Vitruvian theater arranged in a precise order, with the idea that this functioned as a sort of artificial mind, attributing to the imagination the ability to understand, reconstruct and interpret the world. An idea deeply akin to Fornasetti's creativity.
The exhibited objects establish a profound dialogue with the places of the Pilotta, echoing their cultural dimension, of thought, dream and imagination.
Following the red thread traced by these elective affinities, the exhibition disseminates hundreds of works from the Atelier among the Pilotta collections, accompanied by brief explanatory texts and selected quotations from other authors that offer suggestions and interpretations.
"Fornasetti Theatrum Mundi" thus demonstrates the depth and universality of the contemporary regeneration of classicist forms in a witty counterpoint between Fornasetti's inventions and the collections and spaces of one of the most important Italian and European museums.
03 June 2020 – 14 February 2021 (Parma, Monumental Complex of the Pilotta)
Cover image: Installation in the XNUMXth century halls of the National Gallery of the Monumental Complex of the Pilotta. ph Cosimo Filippini
