The Labirinto della Masone by FrancoMaria Ricci hosts the exhibition 'Musca Depicta.
There is a fly on the painting', curated by Sylvia Ferino and Elisa Rizzardi: a curious exhibition that follows the appearances of the fly in the visual arts starting from Giotto's school and up to the contemporary.
The small insect will invade the exhibition rooms of the Labyrinth on the occasion of the forty years since the publication by Franco Maria Ricci of the volume Musca depicta, in which André Chastel's essay retraced for the first time the artistic incarnations of the buzzing dipteran in European painting from the 15th to the 17th century.
The aim of the exhibition is to significantly expand the picture outlined in the 1984 book, offering a multifaceted reading of an insect that has always been considered annoying and inappropriate, whose representation has revealed controversial backgrounds and curiosities over time.
More than fifty literary works, graphics, sculptures and manuscript and printed volumes unfold throughout the exhibition according to a specific thematic order.
But, as Leon Battista Alberti recalls in the Eulogy contained in the fundamental incunabulum that opens the exhibition, the fly is free: it knows no hierarchies or limits of relevance.
In ancient times, the realistic representation of a fly in the painting could suggest different interpretations, from the Christian warning not to indulge in worldliness, to the idea that the ephemeral little creature could embody the artist's fleeting fame, through deception - trompe l'oeil -which demonstrated the painter's virtuosity.
But the fly also rests indifferently on food and animals, as in the motionless and hyper-realistic works of Maurizio Bottoni, while in the video Fly by Yoko Ono it is a naked body that is crossed for 24 minutes.
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