Hosted in the Andito degli Angiolini space at Palazzo Pitti, “The Immensity of the Universe in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni” exhibition encompasses 100 floral compositions, still lives and miniatures by the Baroque, Marche-born painter friend of Artemisia Gentileschi.
The show has been curated by Sheila Barker of The Medici Archive Project and the Advancing Women Artists foundation is running a challenge to inspire the creation of contemporary art based on Garzoni’s oeuvre. While her role in the evolution of scientific illustration is widely acknowledged, Giovanna Garzoni is less familiar as an illustrator of geographical fantasy in the age of the Baroque.
In harmonic and often relatively small compositions, the painter combines exotic objects of extremely varied provenance such as Chinese porcelain, Pacific nautili, Mexican marrows and flowers, South American plants and English lapdogs, in an effort both to astonish and to amuse.
Turning her back on the conventional role reserved for women in her day, Garzoni travelled in Italy, and possibly also in France, gaining access to the most important collections of curios of her era. The exhibition showcases her works collected by the Medici and still owned by the Gallerie degli Uffizi, alongside targeted loans illustrating the artist’s field of action and her prowess as a portraitist.
On the basis of a previously untapped inventory, a section of the exhibition reconstructs Vittoria della Rovere’s Wunderkammer, once hosted in the Sala dell’Aurora in the villa of Poggio Imperiale, thus indirectly shedding light also on a leading member of the grand ducal family.
Titian (active 1506–1576) produced a masterful group of paintings for Philip II of Spain, celebrating the loves of gods, goddesses, and mortals. Depicting scenes from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, Titian named them “poesie” and considered the works as visual equivalents of poetry.
Leonor Fini
Self-made and self-taught, she preferred to work on her own and was known for her fierce independence and provocative panache. A prolific painter, Fini also wrote, worked extensively in book illustration and printmaking, and designed for plays, ballets, operas, and film.
The first comprehensive publication exploring the life and art of pioneering American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason is perfect for audiences eager to discover unsung yet brilliantly talented women artists.
Alice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist’s multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.
Alex currently lives in Paris with his film editor wife, Tiffany, and enjoys discovering the hidden corners of the city that sketching and plein air painting allow. He uses the language of cinema to inform his images, moving beyond what one sees, and depicting what he wants others to see. He believes that in our too-crowded lives, sketching and plein air painting invite us to move at a more deliberate pace… a true sense of place, and sometimes unexpected stories are revealed.
Manet called him “the greatest painter of all.” Picasso was so inspired by his masterpiece Las Meninas that he painted 44 variations of it. Francis Bacon painted a study of his portrait of Pope Innocent X. Monet and Renoir, Corot and Courbet, Degas and Dalí…for so many champions of art history, the ultimate soundboard was—and remains—Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660).
