Electa

Today, Alice Cairati takes up the position of Communications and Promotion Manager of the Piemme, Sperling & Kupfer and Electa publishing houses, reporting directly to General Manager Stefano Peccatori.

Born in Milan in 1984, she graduated from the University of Milan with honours in Philosophical Sciences. Cairati began her professional career with the Mondadori Group 13 years ago, at the Mondadori Electa publishing house. After three years of experience in marketing, she shifted to communications and events in 2014, before becoming Communications Manager for the Varia line of Mondadori Electa, Sperling & Kupfer, Piemme in 2019.

The new communications structure entrusted to Alice Cairati was designed to develop integrated communication plans, in which the press office, digital communications and promotion are coordinated strategically and effectively. In this respect, Cetta Leonardi is head of the Radio and TV Press and Promotion Office, Alessandro Ventura is head of the Digital Communications and Promotion Office, while Cairati remains responsible for the Events Office.

Milan is celebrating Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), a master of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with an extensive retrospective that will stand out among exhibitions this autumn, as it is designed to cover all the topics and subjects of his long and multifaceted experience.

Baj returns to Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale exactly a hundred years after his birth and twelve years after the exhibition I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli (The Funerals of the Anarchist Pinelli) was held in the same room. For the first time, this exhibition will be integrated in an anthological itinerary and a timely dialogue with other works by the master.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj and includes nearly fifty works distilled in a time span ranging from the early 1950s to the dawn of 2000. It crosses the artist’s research phases and his adherence to different movements over time: from the revival of Dadaism and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from his closeness to the Nordic CoBrA to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the gestural abstraction of his beginnings, passing through the birth of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of the Generals, the exhibition touches on the parody of extraterrestrial invasions, reaching the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and trumeaux.

His characters that have become part of the common imagination — the Ladies and Generals, the Ultrabodies, the Mirrors, the Furniture and the Monsters of the Apocalypse — will animate a flurry of creatures from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who made irony and the grotesque a picklock for dismantling bourgeois conformism and taking sides against all forms of consolidated power.

His celebrated aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the truncated chests of his emblazoned soldiers, is a thread that stitches together sections of the broadest themes of Baj’s poetics, freed from a rigid chronological sequence or genre classification, with continuous cross-references between art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that, also in the setting, suggests a theatrical time and space for observers.

From 16 July to 13 September 2024, in anticipation of the major retrospective at Palazzo Reale, the Museum of Natural History on Corso Venezia will also host a tribute dedicated to by the artist’s engravings and books, in which Enrico Baj classified the natural world with irony and imagination. Under the title Enrico Baj. Zoologia fantastica e altre nature (Fantastic Zoology and Other Natures) will feature 22 panels divided among the Manuale di zoologia fantastica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), Paradiso perduto (Paradise Lost), the folder I Fiori (The Flowers, with its visionary botany), as well as etchings from the famous De Rerum Natura of 1958, a homage (reinvented) to Lucretius’ Latin poem.

BAJ. BajchezBaj is also in Savona and Albissola Marina.
The unique catalogue published by Electa

To mark the centenary of the Milanese artist’s birth, an exhibition curated by Luca Bochicchio and dedicated to Baj’s ceramic work in all its historical and chronological development opens on 8 October. Entitled BAJ. Baj chez Baj will open at the Ceramics Museum in Savona, with a section also at MuDA – Museo Diffuso Albisola in Albissola Marina, in the exhibition centre and Casa Museo Jorn. The scientific collaboration between Milan and Savona, among curators and institutions, aims to outline two independent yet complementary itineraries paying homage to Baj’s eclectic genius. This is documented in the single catalogue published by Electa, in which the two exhibition itineraries unravel between places, forms, materials and encounters, tracing Baj’s fascinating cosmogony, an epiphany of intelligence and creativity.

Baj will also become a topic in Electa’s A-Z series, an array of monographic titles on eclectic 20th-century figures.

Electa will be present at the 60^th International Art Exhibition with dedicated publishing offers and updated layouts for its bookshops at the Venice Biennale.

At the bookshop: selected spaces, objects and books

The bookshop at the Arsenale Corderie (project by Migliore + Servetto Architects, 2022), also coordinated with the bookshop at the Giardini della Biennale, will have a new identity thanks to the graphic project by the Sonnoli studio to enhance the Biennale’s historical posters, drawn from the Biennale Library – ASAC.
In the same spaces, Electa will be presenting six official merchandising lines, including institutional ones curated by Studio De Valence and Marco Camuffo, plus the line of novelties designed for this edition by the Brazilian studio Campo.

Maintaining a focus on reading, Electa has also worked on an ‘author’s’ selection of titles. In fact, part of the titles at the bookshops were entrusted to an external ‘search’, presenting an unprecedented slant on the many themes of contemporary culture suggested by the exhibition. Anna Toscano, a writer, photographer and journalist who teaches Italian at Ca’ Foscari and other universities, seized the challenge to cross the threads connected with Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennale Arte 2024, developing a selection of around 300 titles in Italian and English, ranging from novels to essays to poetry.
Philosophical books, anthropological essays, comic books, photobooks, anthologies and short stories were identified and listed under four keywords, four suggestions that run through their contents and trace their trajectory.

Geography, with themes related in different ways and forms to migration, decolonisation, travelling and movement, and thus to people, bodies, language and anthropology;
Language, with titles that explore language in the broadest sense of the term;
People incorporates the concept of individuals and collectivity and traces a path through identity, gender, bodies, activism, migration, ideas, feminism, anthropology, philosophy and decolonisation;
Venice is a tribute that includes texts for leaving the stereotypical image of the Lagoon and entering an awareness of what the city of the Biennale has been, what it is and what it can become.

The four themes, however, intentionally represent a non-categorical selection, in which the boundary between topics can be ‘disputed’ and a book can find a place in the ‘word’ next to it. As with genres, this bibliography is in fact designed to elide or shift the boundary between literary genres: poetry sometimes tends to prose and prose to non-fiction, which can also cross over into poetry or philosophy. There are no limits to this division. Indeed it is a sharing of words without borders, because “when we all recognise ourselves as foreigners”, as Julia Kristeva writes, borders no longer have any reason to exist.

The range of books is completed with the catalogues of the Pavilions and Country Participations, illustrated volumes on the artists present in the International Exhibition, new publications on art/photography/fashion/graphic design, art commentary and focuses on refugee artists and writers.

The Electa catalogues for the Art Biennale 2024

For the 60^th Venice Biennale, Electa is publishing Due qui/To Hear, the guide to the Italian Pavilion, edited by Luca Cerizza and designed by Studio Folder, presenting the project by Massimo Bartolini in collaboration with Caterina Barbieri, Gavin Bryars and Kali Malone.

Among other Electa publications for the 60^th International Art Exhibition, we would like to mention the catalogue of the Saudi Arabian National Pavilion, curated by Maya El Khalil and Jessica Cerasi, where Manal Aldowayanis exhibiting the work Shifting Sands: A Battle Song, and the book H2O Venezia: Diari d’Acqua – Water Diaries, curated by Mara Hofmann, the catalogue of a collective exhibition resulting from a residency programme for women artists who worked on a visual narrative about Venice.

Parallel to the 60th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert. The Form and the Symbol, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri and promoted and supported by the Foundation for the Development of Art and Culture of Uzbekistan, is opening at Ca’ Foscari University. This exhibition introduces the Italian and international public to a little-known page of artistic history in the first half of the 20th century. It presents over 100 works from the Tashkent Museum and the Nukus Museum, long described as the ‘Louvre of the Desert’, highlighting the connection between the Russian Avant-Garde and Central Asian art. Electa Catologue (Italian and English editions).

Also available at Electa bookshops is the Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1877, in Italian and English editions, edited by Marco Mulazzani.

Milan, the city where Gabriele Basilico (August 1944 – February 2013) was born and lived, celebrates the 10th anniversary of the photographer’s death with “Gabriele Basilico. My Cities”, an extensive exhibition divided across two venues: Palazzo Reale and Triennale Milano. The exhibition is open to the public from 13 October 2023 until 7 January 2024 and is the first major tribute that the city of Milan is dedicating to Gabriele Basilico, his work and his cosmopolitan point of view, which let him capture the soul of every city.

The exhibition consists of more than 500 works, starting in Milan, at the Triennale, before arriving at the World, at the Palazzo Reale.

“Gabriele Basilico. My Cities” is promoted by the Comune di Milano-Cultura, Palazzo Reale and Triennale Milano, together with our publishing house Electa. The exhibition was made possible with the research partnership of the Gabriele Basilico Archive.

At the Palazzo Reale, the exhibition has been organised by Giovanna Calvenzi and Filippo Maggia and features a selection of Basilico’s works realised for major international clients. At the Triennale, a large selection of images of Milan and its suburbs, curated by Giovanna Calvenzi and Matteo Balduzzi, is on display.

The exhibition at the Palazzo Reale

Around 200 works selected from the Basilico Archive, which contains the artist’s most important works from international events throughout his career, are on display at the Palazzo Reale.

In the Lucernario, “Sezioni del paesaggio italiano (Sections of the Italian Landscape)” is exposed. It is a seminal study on the transformation of the national landscape created for Venice’s 6th Biennale Architettura in 1996, in collaboration with Stefano Boeri (96 prints, 30×40 cm). The study involves six sections of the country, from North to South Italy, corresponding to about 50 km each, linking a well-established urban area to a densely populated suburban area.

On display in the Sala delle Cariatidi are 100 photographs of more than 40 cities taken for prestigious international commissions, including Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Moscow, London, Paris, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Boston, Liverpool, Rome, Berlin, Lisbon, Valencia, Jerusalem, Beirut, Amman, Monte Carlo, Hong Kong and others.

As part of the celebrations for the centenary of Italo Calvino’s birth, our publishing house Electa is presenting two exhibitions dedicated to the great writer, one in Rome and one in Genoa.

The Roman exhibition entitled “Favoloso Calvino. Il mondo come opera d’arte. Carpaccio, de Chirico, Gnoli, Melotti e gli altri” will open Oct. 13 at the Scuderie del Quirinale and will remain open to the public until Feb. 4, 2024. The exhibition, curated by Mario Barenghi in collaboration with Electa, thoroughly explores Calvino’s connection with the arts through more than 400 works including paintings, sculptures, drawings and first editions of the writer’s books. The exhibition, which began as a “visual” project, will enable not only Calvino lovers, but also new readers, to learn more about the life and literary production of one of the leading figures of twentieth-century literature.

Parallel to the exhibition in Rome, from October 15 2023, to April 7 2024, the exhibition project “Calvino cantafavole” curated by Eloisa Morra and Luca Scarlini opens at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, in the spaces of the Loggia degli Abati. The Genoese exhibition organized by Electa, in collaboration with the Scuderie del Quirinale, Teatro della Tosse and Lele Luzzati Foundation, is divided into six sections to give visitors a chance to explore Calvino’s relationship with the world of fairy tales in greater depth.

The exhibitions, part of the program for the centennial celebration of Calvin’s birth, will be accompanied by the publication of related catalogues:

In addition to the catalogues, Electa has also planned other publishing activities dedicated to Italo Calvino: a new edition of Idem by Giulio Paolini, a valuable and now unobtainable work; the volume Calvino A-Z, edited by Marco Belpoliti, for the Enciclopedie series; Il dubbio e il desiderio, a new title in the Oilà series edited by Silvia Bencivelli and dedicated to Eva Mameli Calvino, the writer’s mother.

After the success of Cucina verde (2021) and Cucina a colori (2022), Mondadori Store is launching a new exclusive initiative made in collaboration with Mondadori Electa: Mari e monti in cucina, a journey through the regions of Italy to rediscover the tastiest and most traditional recipes that support sustainability by using local ingredients and local producers.

The cookbook, available from 2 October, and only in Mondadori Stores, contains 180 dishes, divided by their region of origin, where raw materials play a central role. From mountain cuisine, with its rich, spicy and warm dishes, to the fresh and fragrant dishes of the sea, passing through the lakes, which are often forgotten but which offer endless culinary insights, and the golden-brown countryside, with healthy and authentic dishes, in this book you will embark on a journey through the Italian regions to rediscover the tastiest and most traditional recipes, and delve into some of the aspects that make Italy a true standard for beauty in the world.

The book will be available from 2 October for only €2.90 when purchasing 2 additional books of your choice in participating Mondadori Stores and at mondadoristore.it.

Press office references
Mondadori Electa
Daniela Giustacchini: daniela.giustacchini@mondadori.it / +39 328-2227726
Mondadori Store
pressoffice@mondadori.it – 02 75423159

The major exhibition dedicated to Italo Calvino (Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba 1923 – Siena 1985) was presented as a preview to the press and the public at the 35th edition of the Turin International Book Fair. The exhibition will open in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale in October 2023. Curated by Mario Barenghi, organised by Ales S.p.A./Scuderie del Quirinale in collaboration with the Electa publishing house, it is among the main events of the official program celebrating the centenary of the writer’s birth.

It is a ‘visual’ project, covering Calvino’s character and work, which will address both his admiring public and ‘new’ readers and young people, who are only now coming to his works. Particular attention will be paid to Calvino’s relationship with the arts, which curator Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti spoke of today in a discussion planned for the Fair, introduced by Rosanna Cappelli, CEO of Electa and Matteo Lafranconi, the Scuderie Director.

The exhibition will be a journey through the life, the choices, the political and civil involvement, the places and above all the literary output and the working method of the writer that will run through the history across ten sections on the two floors of the Scuderie del Quirinale.

The Scuderie del Quirinale, together with Electa, are also once again collaborating with the Liguria Region, the city of Genoa and the Palazzo Ducale Foundation to celebrate Calvino’s centenary, the year that Genoa is Italy’s Book Capital. In October, the city and the Palazzo Ducale will pay tribute to Calvino, starting a site-specific project on the theme of fairy tales and the countryside, which will end in the spring of 2024 when the Roman exhibition travels to Genoa.

Electa will publish a guidebook for the exhibition designed by Studio Sonnoli and edited by Mario Barenghi, as well as a volume of the encyclopaedia series entitled Calvino A-Z, with numerous articles assigned to major specialists and the whole work curated by Marco Belpoliti, who has recently edited for Mondadori Italo Calvino. Take a look.

The Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, together with Liberty and our publishing house Electa, present the FuturLiberty Exhibition from April 5, 2023.

The exhibition, under the scientific curatorship of Ester Coen and artistic direction of Federico Forquet for the fabrics, delves into the history of the futurist movement in an unprecedented way, through a selection of paintings and applied arts exposed in the two seats of the Modern and Contemporary Art Museums of the Municipality of Milan. The works of the futurist movement’s protagonists, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Fortunato Depero are harmoniously combined with the Vorticist paintings of contemporary English artists, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Nevinson, starting from the “Vital English Art” manifesto of 1914, signed by Europe’s avant-gardist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These artists in turn represented the source of inspiration that guided Federico Forquet and Liberty’s design team in the creation of two new collections.

The inspiring avant-gardes of Futurism and Vorticism express the transition from past practices through a sharp outlook towards the future, by influencing the culture expressed in traditions and in all forms of everyday routines. Strength, energy and dynamism all reflect the vitality of the forms that boosted the creativity of Liberty’s designers throughout the different eras.
Art life, leisure and identities are recombined into a futurist aesthetic, into a vision aimed at reshaping principles and traditions.

The project includes over 200 works in 2 seats. At the Museo del Novecento museum, the exhibition is focused on the interdisciplinarity of avant-garde movements. This unprecedented and fascinating journey is divided into 8 sections, varying from Futurism and Vorticism with essential works of the Museo del Novecento museum’s collection, of which 15 created by renowned authors such as Boccioni, Balla, Severini and Carrà, and others borrowed from prestigious Italian and international institutions, among which the MART of Rovereto, GAM of Turin, Banca d’Italia, Tate, British Council, Estorick Collection, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, William Morris Gallery of London, Sainsbury Centre of Norwich; all there to be compared to the designs of the Liberty collections.

Moreover, images of Milan’s stylish buildings will be projected to further appreciate its Liberty-style architectures. This journey combines architecture and decorations with the designs of the prestigious London archive, thus highlighting the stylistic influence of floral and geometric patterns to reveal a close connection between these two cities.

In the Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace, the focus is instead oriented towards the extraordinary creativity which characterises Liberty’s story and its past and present designers. For the first time since the V&A of 1975, which celebrated its centenary, the paintings, drawings, tapestries, fabrics, clothes, furnishings, photographs and a wide selection of unpublished materials from the Liberty archive will be exhibited in 8 rooms, starting with a section dedicated to its partnership with William Morris.
The exhibition reveals the influences that most affected both the careers of some great masters, among which William Morris, Bernard Nevill and Federico Forquet, and the ideas that redesigned the future throughout the eras by glancing back at the past. The fabric connects the beginning and end of a journey through shapes, colours, patterns and refractions of light.

A guide of the Museo del Novecento museum and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace leads visitors through this artistic journey, organized by Electa and curated by Ester Coen.

The Museo del Novecento museum houses the largest collection of works from the futurist movement, also thanks to the recent loan of some precious masterpieces of Boccioni, Balla, Severini, among others, from the Gianni Mattioli collection. The futurist gallery offers visitors a one of a kind opportunity to get acquainted with the most renowned Italian artistic movements worldwide, right in Milan, where the main historical events of this movement unwound. The exhibition, dedicated to the connection between Futurism and English Vorticism, thus finds its ideal seat at the Milanese institution.

The Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine palace: has the task of presenting, preserving and producing evidence of the changes that Milan embraced. The Art Gallery houses paintings, drawings and sculptures representative of the historic, urban and social evolution of the Milanese capital. Milan’s custom and fashion collection is exhibited alternately according to thematic exhibitions and continuously allows to reflect on the interdisciplinarity of decorative arts and design. This is the perfect setting for taking part in Futurliberty, whose focus is dedicated to the study of the connection between art and fashion through the works of great masters of Futurism and Vorticism.

Liberty is the avant-gardist of design and decorative arts since 1875. It is internationally renowned for its fabrics, in particular for its floral patterns, but also for a long history of experiments with bold geometric designs reminiscent of the shapes and colours of the early 20th-century’s avant-garde art, in particular of those created by Italian futurists and English Vorticists. The extraordinary archive of over 50.000 drawings and prints from the beginning to present day is a constant source of inspiration. For Liberty’s 150 years, the esteemed interior couturier and designer Federico Forquet has curated a striking new range of fabrics – the FuturLiberty collection – aimed at bringing Liberty’s creative legacy into our era. The collections are produced in the northern Italian plant, in Lombardy, using both innovative digital technologies and century-old techniques.

Electa presents Oilà, the new series, edited by Chiara Alessi, that tells the stories of twentieth-century female figures who distinguished themselves in the Italian and international creative setting (from design to fashion, architecture to music, illustrations to graphics, photography to literature) by practising disciplines and professions that had always been considered part of the male universe. The graphics are developed by Studio Sonnoli.

The first three titles, which will be simultaneously released on March 8, are dedicated to Elsa Schiaparelli, Lisetta Carmi and Vanessa Bell: three protagonists, three characters, three stories, three individuals stories that transformed the way of interpreting art, design, photography and fashion and that contributed to the social and artistic emancipation of women. The stories take place in the midst of wars, displacements and social revolutions, in a world, or profession, not considered suitable for women.

The books

The books, intended to be read aloud from beginning to end in forty-five minutes – a short journey –  detail the stories of people’s biographies, jobs, private situations and public achievements. Small in format, with a defined layout and special cover for each individual title, the texts were entrusted to scholars, experts, writers and professionals. Each series begins with a story or anecdote on the life and profession of these women, digging into their childhood, family or sentimental relationships, based on the correspondence and diaries preserved in the archives, or on unpublished and unknown projects, to free women from preconceptions only aimed as seeing them as daughters, wives or sisters (such as Vanessa for Virginia Woolf).

And so, the series, or collection, of monographic readings based on the characters’ personal stories was created in the form of notebooks.

The title

The playful title of the series, Oilà, was taken from the famous verses of the socialist song La Lega [The League], which then became part of common italian women workers’ life. “Although we’re women, we’re not afraid, we have beautiful and nice mouths to defend ourselves. A oilì oilì oilà and our league will grow.”

Oilà is also a way to greet someone unexpected, the sound of someone caught by surprise. This series represents the voice and work of women.

Rossella Locatelli

The future, whatever it may hold. Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli’s circumstances seem like an ongoing struggle in the name of small freedoms. Alongside other women sharing this feeling. Fashion comes from instinct, revenge, necessity. Hers is a quick and absolutely spontaneous revolution. Although ironical or cruel at times, Schiap’s vision of fashion is closely linked to women’s obsessions and manias, or to a profound desire of independence. And… She is never alone in her fury.

Anna Toscano

With love and friendship. Lisetta Carmi

The hands, eyes and heart. Initially, Lisetta Carmi’s fingers run up and down the black and white keys of a piano, her eyes follow the keyboard from left to right, and her heart beats to the rhythm of a well-tempered harpsichord. Then, Lisetta Carmi’s fingers record and write the life of others through pictures. Pictures of people, streets, harbours, theatres, hospitals and cemeteries. Pictures of death and sex: of humanity Eyes and hearts to help her understand both others and herself. With love and friendship.

Luca Scarlini

Life is terrible and fun. Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell is always available for others: her husband, Clive Bell, despite his betrayals and critical mindset towards the artist’s life; Duncan Grant, the love of her life and colleague, who is however attracted by men; Omega Worshop, which according to its founder and financier, Roger Fry, wants to suppress the cult personality of her representatives; her sister, Virginia Woolf, through whom her work as an artist, graphic designer, decorator and illustrator is always interpreted. Vanessa Bell is there for others, those close to her have never jeopardised her art, on the contrary, they’ve fed it.

The “Pisanello. The World’s Tumult” exhibition opens in Mantua.  An exhibition created to mark the 50th anniversary of the exhibition curated by Giovanni Paccagnini, where one of the most important acquisitions in the field of art history in the twentieth century was presented: the discovery in the rooms of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua of the Arthurian cycle painted using mixed techniques around 1430-1433 by Antonio Pisano, known as Pisanello.

The exhibition, produced and promoted by the Mantua Palazzo Ducale, is part of a wide-ranging, long-term programme to promote the work and the Sala dedicated to the artist, together with the adjacent Sala dei Papi. In fact, the layout of the entire room (9.50 × 17.50 m [31.16 × 57.41 ft]; 3 walls out of 4 have also revealed the frescoed sinopie; 100 square metres between the frescoes and sinopie) was permanently remodelled to make better use of an exceptional discovery for Italian artistic heritage.

Thanks to a new lighting system, the project completely restores clarity to the paintings, which were pulled out and relocated over fifty years ago. Instead of the natural diffused lighting from before, warm lighting is now aimed at Pisanello’s wall paintings, bringing out the reflections of the golden inserts and the painting’s magnificent details. In addition, a raised platform allows the visitor to appreciate the paintings at the correct distance calculated by the artist as, until now, the guided tour path was 110 cm [43,30 inch] lower due to subsequent changes to the room.

So, there is now a “new” tour path, enhanced by additional equipment, which allows the public to rediscover the richly-detailed work from the “correct” point of view, as described by Pisanello, as well as its curving lines and the artist’s extraordinary meticulous touch.

The permanent work in the Sala del Pisanello is supported by the work of the Politecnico di Milano, the regional campus of Mantua, under the supervision of Eduardo Souto de Moura; the temporary part of the exhibition is designed by Archiplan Studio which has also been in charge of providing all the artworks.

“Pisanello. The World’s Tumult”, curated by Stefano L’Occaso, is an exhibition that involves two large adjacent, connecting rooms on the main floor, the Sala del Pisanello and the adjacent Sala dei Papi, in addition to the rooms on the ground floor, set up to exhibit an overview of Late Gothic culture in Mantua, displaying an excellent selection of paintings, sculptures and miniatures.

The Sala del Pisanello is dedicated to the cycle of paintings linked to the preparatory drawings, the wall paintings and the sinopie exhibited. The Sala dei Papi is permanently set up with historical photos, the material traces of a special removal operation, some currently unexposed sinopie and everything that can describe the technique in Pisanello’s paintings, their discovery, the aforementioned exhibition in 1972 and the restoration work from the 1960s to today.

An interactive multimedia system completes the exhibition. It’s possible to view all the details of the Arthurian cycle at a magnification never seen before via a touchscreen monitor, and navigate an accurate three-dimensional reconstruction of the Sala del Pisanello created by the 3D designer Matteo Morelli when it was still called the Sala dei Principi, or at a point in time prior to the work that led to the discovery of the cycle.

Finally, in the rooms of the Appartamento di Santa Croce on the ground floor, suitably shielded from outside light, there are works from about the year 1400 to the middle of the 15th century that show and give an overview of the panorama of contemporary artistic culture in Mantua. These include the Dalle Masegne statues that now decorate the cathedral; the works of Stefano da Verona, another leading figure in the age of Pisanello; the illuminated manuscripts that show the development of the Gonzaga family’s tastes, a development that leads to the example of the missal of Barbara di Brandenburgo, started by Belbello da Pavia and finished by Girolamo da Cremona, in a richly Renaissance style.

Works by Pisanello that are not directly linked to the Arthurian cycle also find a home in this room.

The exhibition includes about 30 works, including international loans such as Pisanello’s masterpieces like the Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony and Saint George from the National Gallery of London, in Italy for the first time since its “departure” in 1862, and the paintings in the Louvre Museum in Paris. There’s also the Adoration of the Magi by Stefano da Verona from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and, last but not least, the precious Madonna of the Quail, one of Pisanello’s juvenilia, considered to be one of the symbolic works of the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, also available by virtue of an existing promotion agreement between the two Museums based on the artistic relations between Verona and Mantua.

Among the contributors supporting both the exhibition being undertaken and continued, we must highlight the Banca Agricola Mantovana Foundation. For many years it has offered its support to the initiatives promoted by the Palazzo Ducale, contributing to the promotion of the national artistic heritage and the dissemination of art and culture in the Mantuan community.

The exhibition comes with a brochure published by Electa and will be open until 8 January 2023.