After Galileo nothing was as before. And not only in astronomical research and sciences, but also in art. With him, the sky passes from astrologers to astronomers.
In an exhibition with completely original characters, where absolute masterpieces of Western art in dialogue with different testimonies and finds, they allow you to discover a character who has been heard of by all but really known by few.
The Galileo man emerges from the exhibition in many facets: from the scientist father of the experimental method to the man of letters exalted by Foscolo and Leopardi, Pirandello and Ungaretti, De Sanctis and Calvino. From Galileo virtuoso musician and performer to Galileo artist, outlined by Erwin Panofsky as one of the major art critics of the seventeenth century; from the Galileo entrepreneur - not only the telescope but also the microscope or the compass - to the Galileo of everyday life. Since the man, exceptional in his power of intuition and scientific genius, was also exceptional in his small vices and weaknesses, such as his viticulture studies and his passion for the wine of the Euganean Hills – refusing the "vil coin" he barters his instruments of precision with wine “of the best” – or the production and sale of medicinal pills.
To document the "Galileo Revolution" Giovanni CF Villa brings together an impressive number of works of art in the Palazzo del Monte di Pietà in Padua, starting with the splendid watercolors and sketches of Galileo himself, which show his very high quality as a draftsman. The scientist was, moreover, an attentive observer of art, as confirmed by the salacious comments on the wooden inlays - "without softness and made of sticks" - but also on Arcimboldo, author of "capricci which have a confused and unordered mixture of lines and colors". The influence of Galilean conquests and of modern science on artistic culture is already evident in the early seventeenth century: with the meticulous rendering of nature, as evidenced by the extraordinary works of Brueghel and Govaerts, but also in a painting that immediately incorporates the irrepressible scope of Galileo's 'machines'.
In 1610 Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius, and an immediate effect can be seen in Adam Elsheimer's famous Flight into Egypt, the first depiction of the Milky Way. And then in a sequence of artists capable of depicting the moon as seen through a telescope, so much so that a notable section of the exhibition recounts Galileo's discovery of the moon up to the present day. Even the genre of still life develops new compositional formulas: the symbols of vanitas give way to a documentary representation linked to the development of the natural sciences. And then an iconographic story for masterpieces, among which the painting by Guercino dedicated to the myth of Endymion stands out, with one of the first representations of the telescope perfected by the Pisan scientist. Between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs a real Galilean "workshop" came to life, that is a generation of artists (Artemisia Gentileschi, Empoli, Stefano Della Bella, etc.) able to share the suggestions offered by the scientist's lesson . Like Donato Creti's Astronomical Observations now in the Vatican Pinacoteca: extraordinary canvases depicting stars and planets portrayed so as to show what they look like through a telescope, evoking Galilean discoveries.
Giovanni CF Villa also takes visitors inside the "construction" of the Galilean myth in the nineteenth century. It was 1841 when the Grand Duke Leopold II of Lorraine was building the Galileo Tribune in Palazzo Torrigiani, an extraordinary environment imagined as an iconographic synthesis of experimental science, from Leonardo to Galileo. After the central Florentine episode of Santa Croce, immortalized by Ugo Foscolo, the XNUMXth century became the century of monuments dedicated to Galileo. Here then is Pisa, Rome, the Loggia degli Uffizi in Florence to reach the thirty-sixth statue of the great Paduans in Prato della Valle. To sanction the myth of Galileo alongside that of Dante, the scientist-humanist capable of an epochal revolution for humanity widely reverberated in art.
The exhibition develops a large section of contemporary art that from Previati and Balla reaches up to Anish Kapoor, present in the exhibition with the opening work.
Thus seven centuries of Western art, intertwining with science, technology and Galilean hagiography, fully restore the human parable of Galileo celebrated in a Padua where he saw him as a protagonist for 18 years. Remembered by the scientist as the happiest for the freedom granted to him by the Paduan studio, then at the top of European culture. And it is the same University of Padua which, as announced by its Rector, prof. Rosario Rizzuto, has decided to support the Exhibition with a program of initiatives, meetings, insights on the figure of the one who was one of its most illustrious teachers and Masters.
Info: www.fondazionecariparo.it
