The itinerary is dedicated both to some real animals which over time have taken on complex symbolic meanings, often also in transcultural terms, and to fantastic animals who interpret myths, legends and shared or peculiar beliefs of different peoples and civilizations. It will be a huge dragon created by the set designer-sculptor Gigi Giovanazzi to welcome visitors to the great and spectacular summer exhibition with its jaws wide open "Dragon blood, snake scales”, review that from 10 August to 6 January 2014, will allow those who pass through the magnificent halls of the Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento to discover and get to know through frescoes, paintings, sculptures, tapestries and precious art objects a fantastic world made up of unicorns, dragons, centaurs, griffins, basilisks, sphinxes, snakes and fantastic and unusual animals that constantly recur in mythology and also in iconography chatelaine.
The numerous animals depicted in the frescoes that decorate the are striking Buonconsiglio castle executed by Dosso Dossi in the decoration of the Stua della Famea with the fables of Phaedrus, or the lady with unicorn, the monkey, the snake biting Envy painted by Girolamo Romanino or the bestiary created by the master Wenceslas in the famous cycle of the Months in Torre Aquila or the precious medieval herbarium kept in the castle.
A theme, that of fantastic animals, which will be the protagonist in the summer exhibition "Dragon blood, snake scales: fantastic animals at the Castello del Buonconsiglio" organized in collaboration with the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Sculpture, painting, architecture and drawing tell the story of the animal world, the fruit of man's fantasies and fears. Paintings, with masterpieces by Titian and Tintoretto, Renaissance sculptures, magnificent tapestries from the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti, precious gold jewels, archaeological objects, as well as exciting films and sets, thanks also to the innovative aid of augmented reality, will amaze and will conquer the largest audience.
The exhibition will be an opportunity to admire sphinxes and centaurs painted both on Greek red and black figure vases and on the canvases of seventeenth-century Bolognese masters, the Egyptian mummified cat, the Renaissance bronze fountain with the myth of Actaeon, the Laooconte from from the Bargello Museum in Florence, a precious bronze falcon, a very rare decorated chasuble (priest's robe), sculptures of St. George and the dragon. From the sacred animals of the Christian tradition to mythology with Diana the huntress to those dear to the gods: the swan, the bull and the eagle for Jupiter, the lion for Samson and Hercules.
And yet the true monsters of legends: dragons, chimeras, unicorns, sphinxes, sea monsters, centaurs and mermaids. Enemy, prey, food, workforce and means of transport, the animal is also an interpreter of the force of primitive nature and of the imaginary in the magic-religious and heroic sphere. The eternal questions of the ferinity present in man and of the anthropomorphism recognized in the animal world emerge through the works on display.
Eagle, lion, snake, deer, horse and fish are some of the real animals that give rise to beings who, in multiple forms of hybridization, which vary according to time and place, are interpreters of man's reflections, fears, hopes and imagination .
You can admire the canvases of the Hercules cycle with the multi-headed dragon, masterfully painted by Paolo de Matteis, the famous dragon with two serpentine wings attached to the same trunk. These dragons were born from the union of the multi-headed Typhon and the serpent-woman Echidna. The sons of the two were Chimera, with the head of a lion and the body of a snake-goat, Cerberus the three-headed dog and the Hydra of Lerna, a reptile with many heads who was later killed by Hercules, who also defeated the hundred-footed Ladon heads and Scylla, with octopus tentacles. The painting preserved in Castel Thun made at the end of the seventeenth century by the German painter Dietterlin is magnificent and depicts the Temptations of St. Anthony the Abbot where dragons throw fire, a winged monster holds a skewer with a chicken and skewered snakes and snakes emerge from the hair of a naked lady .
The exhibition will have a section in Riva del entitled "Immeasurable Monsters" and fantastic creatures among the waves, which intends to exhibit a small but important nucleus of mainly sixteenth-century works on the theme of fantastic creatures and mythical animals which, in the ancient imagination, inhabited the waters of lakes and seas. The main cut given to the Riva exhibition, compared to that hosted in the rooms of the Castle of Trento, derives not only from the peculiarity of the exhibition venue - the Rocca - surrounded by the waters of Garda, but also from the presence in the first rooms of the Pinacoteca, which will host the exhibition of a fresco dating back to the XNUMXs depicting Hercules intent on killing the Hydra, a monstrous being that lived in Lake Lerna in the Greek region of Argolis.
