Milan, the “recycled” beauty on stage at the Prada Foundation

Can ancient art be recycled? Or rather, readapt it and transform it for a new use? This is the question that runs through «Recycling Beauty», the new exhibition set up in the space of the Prada Foundation in Milan, curated by Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola with Denise La Monica, scheduled until 27 February next.

An exhibition project conceived by Rem Koolhaas/Oma, entirely dedicated to the theme of the reuse of Greek and Roman antiquities in post-ancient contexts, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. The premise is necessary before starting the visit: forget the concept of classic understood as a legacy strictly anchored to the past but consider it capable of leaving its mark on your present and future, conceiving it from a different perspective. ‘”Entering the exhibition, one realizes that there is no incipit but a collection of stories, objects, each with something to tell – explains Salvatore Settis – each story is different but each has something in common with the other and the reuse it is a general history that contains them all.

Thus the ancient heritage, and in particular the Greco-Roman heritage, becomes, in Settis’s words, “an access key to the multiplicity of cultures of the contemporary world”. «Recycling Beauty» focuses on the moment in which the ancient piece abandons its initial condition or ruin and is reactivated, acquiring new meaning and value thanks to the gesture of reuse. The exhibition project, conceived by Rem Koolhaas/Oma with Giulio Margheri, develops in two buildings of the Foundation, the Podium and the Cisterna. Central to the exhibition itinerary is the colossal statue of Constantine (4th century AD), one of the most important works of late ancient Roman sculpture, to which two rooms of the Cistern are dedicated.

In the room are the two monumental marble fragments, the right hand and foot, normally exhibited in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, juxtaposed with a 1:1 scale reconstruction of the Colossus, never attempted before.

Collaboration with the Capitoline Museums
The project is the result of a collaboration between the Capitoline Museums, the Prada Foundation and the Factum Foundation, whose scientific supervision was followed by Claudio Parisi Presicce, Capitoline Superintendent of Cultural Heritage and at the end of the exhibition, the Colossus will be exhibited at the Capitoline Museums. In the Podium, however, a landscape of low plinths allows the pieces on display to be perceived as a whole, while workstation-like structures encourage closer inspection thanks to the presence of office chairs. It is interesting how the concept of recycling is not limited to the works alone but is applied to 360 degrees: some parts in fact come from materials from previous exhibitions hosted at the Prada Foundation such as the acrylic bases, for example, used for the first time in 2015 for « Serial Classic», adding a spatial dimension to the key theme of «Recycling Beauty». The itinerary houses over sixty works of art from Italian and international public collections and museums such as the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums and the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries of Florence and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. A special mention goes to Moro Borghese and La Zingarella, a pair of works from the Baroque era recomposed in Rome by the Frenchman Nicolas Cordier mixing ancient fragments with parts of his creation. The two statues had been together since the early seventeenth century in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, while today the Moro is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris and La Zingarella in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. In Fondazione Prada they finally return to dialogue.