Life and death and time at the center, which weaves its web in which man with his flesh remains entangled in an attempt to free himself and perhaps become a hero, from Mycenae to Marvel comics. It is the thread of infinite references in which the instant and eternity unravel. Between us and the ancients - which can be visited from Thursday 4 May and until 30 July 2023 - an exhibition of ancient yet conceptual art as only modern and contemporary art can be. It is no coincidence that it is in Rome in the Great Halls of the Baths of Diocletian, a place of enormous industrial archeology charm that alone is already worth a visit.
Promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport - it is not excluded that it will move to Athens in the future - the exhibition is organized by the General Directorate of Museums and the National Roman Museum in collaboration with Electa. It is conceived and curated by Massimo Osanna, Stéphane Verger, Maria Luisa Catoni and Demetrios Athanasoulis, with the support of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and the participation of the Imt Alti Studi Lucca School and the Southern Higher School.
About 300 works on display "between us and the ancients", divided into five sections: large statues, imposing like the wonderful busus of Cosimo de' Medici by Benvenuto Cellini or elegant like the statue of a young girl from Thera. Fragments or sarcophagi, paintings and funerary vases or even the one with nymphs and satyrs from 1755 by Ginori di Doccia, the bronze clocks and funerary steles that invite you to go back and forth in the large spaces because there will always be some wonder that escapes the eye in the fascinating complexity of this unique exhibition. In the double path, eternity and the instant, there are ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary works. Many have recently been restored and are being exhibited for the first time: such as the chariot of the bride from Civita Giuliana, the statue of Hercules from the Archaeological Park of
The eternity of an instant opens with the emptiness of the cast of two anonymous victims of the Vesuvius eruption, a presence of absence that returns to the theme of the reinterpretation of the ancient with which the exhibition is scattered. To say that the humanity that we leave behind then returns and in this return takes on an absolute value of knowledge but also of compulsion to repeat, artistic, philosophical, literary. Then in the Eternal fame of heroes the war between the Greeks and the Trojans is narrated, and the fragment becomes an evocation in The Order of the Kosmos which concludes with the transfiguration of the myth like the Leda and the Swan of the Borghese Gallery. Works and days in room IV enter the millimetric details of daily life with the ossuary of the Roman ophthalmologist C. Terentius Pistus who for eighty-seven years, five months,
Finally Humans and divines at the center of Room V for a variegated humanity without logic, among statues, anthropomorphic stems like the ethereal Egyptian Sekhmet. Then the journey ends - but can start again indefinitely - among the Roman imperial sarcophagi and the ex votos of a humanity torn to pieces in its search for the absolute that is shipwrecked in its bowels. (HANDLE).
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