Masterpieces among the masterpieces presented by Philippe Daverio- Corriere.it

Life is a journey and travelers live twice. Those who travel with Philippe Daverio experience at least three. From 28 December, an unpublished series of illustrated books entitled Traveling with Philippe Daverio will guide readers to discover the beauties of Italy through the words of the critic, who passed away two years ago. The world, for those who know how to look at it, reveals dimensions of beauty that are often imperceptible to the naked eye. We need that aesthetic education that the philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the romantics believed was the basis of each individual’s way of being in the world. Beauty, when it lights up, brings salvation and beauty is what Daverio dedicated his life to. His passionate vision of him, his rigor full of irony, his eclectic curiosity are the passepartout for traveling informed with him.

Yeah, Passepartout. Professor, gallery owner, councilor for culture in Milan, councilor of Brera, the Teatro alla Scala and the Cini Foundation, Daverio was an extraordinary author and television presenter and Passepartout it was his most successful transmission. He was a master of digression, of an infinite series of links: traveling with him means never stopping at what appears. Following his digressions, parallel worlds can be explored without fear of getting lost.

The first place where Baroque Sicily accompanies us. The Baroque was a revolution of form which acted as a counterbalance to the moral rigidities of the seventeenth century. It explodes like a mask, a firework, an artifact that jokes, plays, mocks spaces and colors: a church by Borromini as big as a pillar of St. Peter’s Basilica. Not only Baroque Rome, but also Baroque Sicily. Here too his freedom is expressed in the chiaroscuro of the canvas, in the folds of the marble, in the illusion of the trompe l’oeilin the curls of the cherubs who mimic the Bourbon wigs.

The identification of a specific Sicilian Baroque style is due to Anthony Blunt, who in his Sicilian Baroque of 1968, identified three stages of development. Baroque arrived in Sicily a few decades later than in Rome and other places, but it asserted itself with a strong sense of theatricality, implemented through scenography on an urban scale: an example is the Quattro Canti in Palermo, a monumental intersection formed by the two main streets of the city. Then the Val di Noto earthquake of 1693 allowed the Duke of Camastra to start a reconstruction that gave us a jewel of unitary language. Finally, around 1730, the Sicilian Baroque began to distance itself from the Roman style, becoming local with architects and artists of the Kingdom such as Andrea Palma, Rosario Gagliardi and Tommaso Napoli. Daverio runs fast and jumps into the pages from Palermo to Genoa, from Rimini to Catania, from Sassuolo to Reims and Paris with his many references.

The second issue of the collection will be dedicated to Rome. Visiting Rome between Mannerism and the eighteenth century with Daverio means starting from the rivalry between two brilliant figures such as Michelangelo and Raphael, passing through the sack of the lansquenets, the metamorphosis of Castel Sant’Angelo from mausoleum to fortress to sumptuous Farnese palace and going through the Counter-Reformation, when Daniele da Volterra puts his underwear on the Sistine Chapel to cover the nudes.

Then the great challenge between Bernini and Borromini, who hardly tolerated each other, and the latter ended up committing suicide by throwing himself over the blade of a sword. Daverio also recounts the birth of the first large private collection, commissioned by Scipione Borghese, who enclosed treasures from classical to neoclassical: Canova’s Paolina Bonaparte.

It has been observed by the aesthetologist Heinrich Wlfflin that Baroque culture is the bearer of an innovative openness to the concept of infinity. Not a pure and simple negation of the finite, but something related to the intimate dynamism of creative reality. But the Baroque, with its Vanitas, with its skulls, with the Arcadia of the past also poses anguished questions about the meaning of human existenceon its precariousness and transmits the restlessness of the things of the world that are only for a moment.

Baroque was one of the last great unitary European styles. And no state is more European than Philippe Daverio. Born in Mulhouse in Alsace and Lgion d’honneur of the French state, DAverio recalled the great familiar Europeanism: We were basic Europeans. Three languages ​​and two dialects were spoken at home; my grandfather did his military service in Berlin and my great-uncle in Paris. Even in these pages, Daverio is a formidable storyteller. He narrates stories and events that light up with anecdotes, flashes of the past, curiosities, impressions. Dotto flaneur, a wanderer of culture, has the ability not to bore and to remain in dialogue with the themes of the present.

Every Wednesday – Free title on the wonders of the Baroque

On Wednesday 28 December, the readers of Corriere della Sera will receive the first volume of the new series Traveling with Philippe Daverio entitled The Baroque marvel, from Sicily to the European courts. It is a series dedicated to the masterpieces of all times, presented by the art critic and historian who died in 2020. A tribute to the beauty of the places and works that Daverio loved and to which he had dedicated his life. His passionate vision, his rigor full of irony, his eclectic and divergent curiosity make up a set of keys that opens every door. An intelligent and light filter capable of connecting the dots in an always surprising, original, new picture. The result is a series of books as agile and quick as his gaze, so skilful in alighting on what is relevant even when it is only a detail, a hidden secret, a flash that crosses the scene. The series consists of fifty volumes, dealing with individual authors or styles or particular eras. The second one, Rome, from the glory of the popes to the splendor of Villa Borghese, will be on newsstands for a week starting January 4, on sale at the price of 6.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper, like all subsequent ones. They will follow: Leonardo, genius of painting, invention and research (January 11); Siena and its eternal Middle Ages (January 18); From Veronese to Canaletto, all the colors of the Serenissima (January 25); From Pompeian red to the pictorial illusions of the domus of Augustus (February 1).