It was inaugurated in Rome, at Villa Farnesina in Trastevere where it is located the loggia of Cupid and Psyche created by Raphael, the exhibition "The colors of prosperity: fruits of the old and new world", curated by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
The event, which will be open to the public until 20 July, is hosted in the splendid villa of Agostino Chigi – known as the Farnesina when it became the property of the Farnese in 1517 – designed in the early 1500s by the Sienese Baldassarre Peruzzi and frescoed, than by Raphael, by Sebastiano del Piombo, Sodoma and Peruzzi himself. The frame is therefore one of the greatest expressions of the Renaissance period: since 1948 the villa has been owned by the Accademia dei Lincei, which promotes its cultural and artistic valorisation.
The theme of the exhibition is that of colours, for which particularly innovative materials were used at the time, and of plants: above all, Raphael's loggia in fact presents botanical representations of exceptional importance for their diversity, for the heterogeneity of origins and habitats of the species, but also for the variety of meanings that can be associated with them. Among the same plants present in the garden of Villa Farnesina there are species of Nova Hispania (South America), recently arrived in Europe after the discovery of America.
Communicate with images
by Patrick Rossano
The loggia of Cupid and Psyche is an extraordinary form of visual communication. In the eyes of the illustrious guest who looked out under its vaults, the reading of a document was proposed which, already from the first impression, was aimed at showing the entire botanical universe known at that time illustrated by the brushes of Giovanni da Udine, the pupil of Raphael who was the masterful executor of everything natural.
In a certain sense, the Loggia is a symbol, an icon, and a part that contains the whole, and a new and original way of narrating, illustrating, documenting scientific knowledge and fits into the midst of the communication revolution that took place a few decades first with the invention of movable type printing by Gutenberg and in the revolution that took place with the new geographical explorations.
After all, traits, signs, figures, symbols, images, icons, two or three-dimensional shapes have always accompanied human history. For millennia, the development of its civilization has gone hand in hand with visual communication. The colored pebbles of Mas d'Azil, dating back over 10 years, tell us about objects that contain symbolic representations—that are used both to communicate and to trade. It can be said that individuals begin to interact, to communicate with each other through sight even before words.
«The spirit is stimulated more slowly by the ear than by the eye» wrote Horace, the greatest Roman poet, in the Ars Poetica. Thanks to the invention of movable type printing, the Renaissance fully resumed a model of visual communication consolidated over the centuries and in the various civilizations, where images used effectively and efficiently were perhaps as necessary as words and writing. In ancient Rome, with the admirable examples of monuments erected by various emperors, starting with Augustus, the codes of knowledge, of one's vision of the world and of the power necessary to dominate them were imprinted in marble.
The Trajan column, as well as the Antonine one, are the best example of visual communication of a story that otherwise, for illiterate people, would have been difficult to narrate in a concise and understandable form. Some argue, for example the printing historian William M. lvins jr, author of the precious Prints and Visual Communications cited by Gombrich, that the Greeks and Romans were limited in technical progress because they lacked the intuition to reproduce images with some technical of printing.
The spread of scientific texts, no longer just manuscripts in a few copies, accompanied by illustrations contributes decisively to forming the new paradigms of communication, must the visual component of the book become not only an ornamental kit but an essential part of the work itself printed. At the same time that the books are composed with movable type, the images are inserted no longer from engraved wooden tables but from metal plates; in Florence, in the second half of the 400th century, metal matrix engravings were experimented which allowed for a much greater circulation of books.
The passage is epochal due to the speed with which science and knowledge spread in the universities, in the courts, in the workshops of the great painters and sculptors who in those years lighted up the scenes of churches and palaces. The Loggia of Cupid and Psyche greatly benefits from this artistic and scientific spirit which pervades the first decades of the 500th century. Agostino Chigi, the wealthy banker and merchant who commissioned the construction of the Villa, intended not only to furnish his home in a rich and sumptuous way, but to express to his guests and interlocutors, with his own visual language, the formal communication of his knowledge, of his power.
As always, this message is entrusted to the images which, by themselves, support all the narrative and communicative system of his social, economic and political condition, as well as his passion for the woman who, after having given him numerous offspring, will become his wife . In this sense, the Loggia, in addition to being an instrument of wonder and a demonstration of power, is also a message of love written with images.
