After the success of last year’s exhibition dedicated to the ideal dialogue between Giotto and Lucio Fontana in the name of gold and its symbolism as a place of the sacred and the infinite, the MAN museum of Nuoro proposes, for Christmas 2024, a new unpublished project dedicated to the dialogue between two masterpieces of El Greco, born Domínikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), famous master of the Siglo de Oro, the century of Spanish gold, known for the exasperation of his shapes elongated in space, the luminescent tones of color, the strong rhythm of the lines
and of the gesture on the canvas.
Defined as the “Delacroix of the Renaissance”, “the Nabi of beautiful icons”, loved by Cézanne and Picasso who declared his debt by repeating «Yo soy El Greco!», El Greco is one of the greatest representatives of European painting of the late Renaissance . Born in Crete in the first half of the sixteenth century, at the time part of the Republic of Venice, he moved to the Lagoon in 1567.
In search of a new way of painting, of a dynamic dimension, which moved away from the two-dimensional, abstract and immobile universe of the oriental tradition, he worked in the workshop of the elderly Titian, from whom he learned the expressive use of colour, violent , total, mellow, luminous, spiritual.
In Venice he was struck by Tintoretto’s sense of movement and dramatic use of light; from Jacopo Bassano he learned the formal elements of pictorial narrative, the use of perspective and architectural backgrounds. After a short and stormy stay in Rome, guest of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, he moved to Toledo, with the dream of winning the favor of King Felipe II and being appointed official painter of the cathedral.
An honor he did not obtain, despite finding noble commissions in the Spanish city that allowed him to develop his excited pictorial language, made up of sudden flashes, bold twists of liquid bodies, which give the figures an acute manifestation of their feelings and the movements of the soul .
The MAN, thanks to a collaboration agreement with the National Academy of San Luca in Rome, presents for the occasion the discovery of a masterpiece by El Greco, The Adoration of the Magi, which remained unknown to the chronicles for centuries and was only returned recent to the authorship of the Cretan genius, thanks to a careful restoration and a campaign of scientific studies that have brought its troubled history to light.
A documentary film, produced by MAN and made by director Stefano Conca Bonizzoni with interventions by Claudio Strinati, Fabrizio Biferali and Fabio Porzio, introduces the visit to the exhibition which also includes a second masterpiece, the Blessing Savior of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, veteran from the important anthology of the master at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
Carlo Franza