EXHIBITION
FLORENCE, ITALY/ GALLERIA dell’ACCADEMIA/ The Guardians
Florence, February 18 –May 18 2014: As part of the celebrations to commemorate the four-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Galleria dell’Accademia of Florence presents the exhibition ‘Ri-Conoscere Michelangelo’ that deals with the complex theme of the renewed interest and admiration for the artist from the XIX century until today.
The exhibition catalog presents Antonio Pio Saracino’s public art project “The Guardians: Hero”. Saracino’s 8,000-pound marble “Hero,” a reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s David, the defender of the city of Florence is on view indefinitely in New York City at Three Bryant Park in the middle of Midtown Manhattan.
The means for handling the topic of the exhibition will be the work of sculptors, painters and photographers who have looked to the figure of Buonarroti and his work as the iconographic point of reference in their own work. Departing from the photographs produced by several of the best-known studios and professionals from the XIX and XXI centuries, we have sought to highlight the decisive role photography has played in consolidating the critical and iconographic fortunes of Michelangelo and, as a consequence, the celebration of his myth. This will be a transverse reading that spans history and photography and will centre on the role photography has played, since its very origins, in celebrating one of the uttermost artists of the Italian Renaissance, selecting a restricted pantheon of images of his sculptures as monuments of the collective memory.
The exhibition itinerary starts out with representations in a historicist vein of Michelangelo’s physiognomy and personality, featuring works by Eugène Delacroix and Auguste Rodin, as well as by other authors who worked with the then-new photographic medium from its very birth, including the early work of Eugène Piot, Édouard-Denis Baldus, the Alinari brothers, and John Brampton Philpot, to name only a few.
