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BETWEEN BOZZOLO & GUASTALLA

The extremely small Duchy of Sabbioneta experienced its heyday just 15 years when Vespasiano Gonzaga installed himself there in 1576 after gaining independence under the protection of the Germanic Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg, king of Bohemia and alchemist.

Sabbioneta, from a modest village that it was, became an important center of culture for a short period. The Gonzaga erected churches, schools, a library and a mint, which had much fanfare even in later times, also a Hebrew printing press, from which came out editions that are still highly prized today.

Fifteen years later, upon the death of Prince Vespasiano in 1591, without his leaving any male descendants, Sabbioneta underwent a rapid decline and came into the possession of various lords, annexed to the tiny Duchy of Guastalla, until being both incorporated into the Larger Duchy of Mantua, whose fortunes it followed … (Treccani enciclopedia)

Garden Palace, Sabbioneta

Vespasiano Gonzaga (1531-1591), educated in Naples before joining the Court of Spain, started to draw the plan of the Ideal City when he was just 25 years old, imagined it already completed and perfect in every part, endowed with monuments, with straight and regular streets, with only two open gates in the solid walls, which encircled the city, star-shaped.

Around 1560 he began the construction of his palace in the central square, near the church but he did not see the palace completed because work was still being done on it in 1591 when he died.

At the limit of the tiny city, on the parade ground, the munificent lord began in 1580 and completed in 1584, a second palace with a large Italian garden, adorned with temples to Venus and Diana, statues, grottoes, fountains and basins, linked to a pomerio : The “Garden Palace”

Gallery of Antiquities, Sabbioneta, with B A S E L I T Z name letters, May 2024

From the far corner of this palace stands the massive building of the Gallery of Antiquities, with a grand portico 60 meters long and 8 meters wide. The upper gallery, decorated by Bernardino Campi and Giovanni da Villa Brabantese contained many valuable objects of Greek and Roman art, statues, busts, amphorae, and sarcophagi, which, later collected and removed in 1771 by Paolo Pozzo at the behest of Maria Theresa, formed the major nucleus of the museum of Mantua, now arranged in that ducal palace.

Today, Georg Baselitz proposes us a rare exercise of exhibition design, with the assistance of curator Detlev Gretenkort, and the newborn Sabbioneta Heritage foundation.

Gallery of Antiquities, upper floor, Baselitz exhibition, Sabbioneta, May 2024

It’s not only an exercise in geography, or even optics and geometry, but also in gymnastics, as you need to avoid craning your neck too quickly from one upside-down work to the next, head down.

Along with mammoth sculptures and large paintings on canvas, ten engravings from 2002, large-scale hand-printed linocuts, each more than two meters high, depicting scenes from 19th-century erotic lithographs, in which partially clothed amorous couples appear.

The addition of a white disc in the center of the linocuts “allows the imagination to spin around, like the hole in a record, around which music plays.”

All the cuts were made using linoleum, a malleable material that allowed the artist to work with ease on a monumental scale in terms of the use of negative space, the lightness of the cutting line, and the elegance of the repeated, short, dynamic strokes.

In an elegant boudoir with walls covered in Pompeian frescoes, the artist awaits you to give you a provocative speech of which he has the secret, broadcast on video and translated into Italian.

Isn’t it the height of elegance for an artist of such renown to lose yourself in the Po’ plain in search of a town barely indicated on road maps, and to evoke with you the dream of exposure and culture of a 16th-century gentleman, friend of the King of Spain and the King of Bohemia?

It’s all deliciously nostalgic for the history of an old continent that’s already disappeared from its own textbooks.

After Barocci, Trasporto di Cristo al Sepolcro, drawing, sanguine, 635×420 m, the dimensions are not related with Sadeler engraving

The exhibition is on view from April 27 to November 24, 2024 at the Galleria degli Antichi in Sabbioneta (MN). Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Last admission is one hour before closing.

Bernardino Campi, Portrait of Vespasiano Gonzaga age 28, 1559

The Church of the Blessed Virgin Incoronata was built between 1586 and 1588 with an octagonal plan. Inside, in the chapel to the left of the high altar, is the polychrome marble funeral monument of Vespasiano Gonzaga made around 1592 by sculptor Giovanni Battista Della Porta.

La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni

Senigallia, città della fotografia, ospita un nuovo spazio dedicato alla collezione di fotografie. In preparazione la IV Biennale di Senigallia, estate 2025, conferenza, fiera 13-15 Giugno 2025.

Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni.

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