The art of Italy in an unprecedented journey. The Baroque of Philippe Daverio – Corriere.it

This is a story of curly-haired cherubs and twisting bodies, sinuous stuccos and decorated columns. This is a story of men, women and business, of wonder and distant horizons. the history of the Baroque, as only Philippe Daverio can tell it. More than two years after his death, his voice continues to speak to us about art. And a new series entitled Traveling with Philippe Daverio, an unpublished series of illustrated books on newsstands with Corriere della Sera, starts with one of the historical periods that the Milanese critic loved most, the Baroque.

The era (between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in which art came out of the churches and patrician palaces to become a real vision of the world, merging with a way of thinking that reached from Milan to Palermo, just like this journey of fifty volumes intends to make. And not only through painting and sculpture: the Baroque was also music, theater, architecture. high craftsmanship, such as the precious frames by Sansovino, a Florentine sculptor and architect who lived in Venice, those with so many rosettes and pods that one spontaneously exclaims: How much Baroque!.

How baroque is a church full of confessionals like that of, say, the Ges in Genoa. Where, Daverio points out, the presence of so many corners dedicated to confession recalls an intelligence network appointed to steal the people’s sensitive data (the Jesuits played a political role for the very Catholic government of Spain). And how baroque thereto Santa Teresa del Bernini, in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome: the Baroque was a precise cardinal and papal will, when it was decided to relaunch the city seat of the papal throne. It was not a fad, it was a key to interpretation: this is why we pass so naturally from the ecstasy of the saint to the churches with which Bernini and Borromini rivaled with shots of special effects, brilliant touches, depth perspectives.

Meanwhile, in Palermo, that corner of the city was born which goes by the name of Quattro Canti and which today is the heart of an urban body extended into the Cssaro, the main street. Little painting in Palermo, lots of architecture, lots of Baroque monuments: the Pretoria fountain, for example. But if you move a few kilometers and enter the Oratory of San Lorenzo, the stuccos of Giacomo Serpotta (Jack the Stuccatore, Daverio called him) remind us that the Baroque was also innovation: The desire to imitate marble leads the artist to a particular technique called lustratura, i.e. the ability to finish the surface of the work with hot marble powders that give the illusion of a metaphysical and brilliant material.

But it will be in Catania that the Baroque will take yet another turn: destroyed by the earthquake of 1693, the city will be rebuilt following the canons of this new feeling, but without emphasis and without rhetoric. it is rather in the details that the Catanese Baroque is felt: even in the palaces that seem more Renaissance or more modern, there is a subtle theatricality that is not only inherent in the style, but also part of the Sicilian character. Therefore the Baroque is camouflaged in a regional peculiarity. On the other hand, Gilles Deleuze traced the Baroque twist in Mallarm’s poetry as well as in Research of Proust.

Fold after fold, here we are in the liveliest province, Rimini. Which was able to welcome the lesson of Giotto first and then of Caravaggio. Guercino, to be precise: firmly under the protection of Prince Francesco I d’Este, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri allows himself the luxury of developing a very personal pictorial dramaturgy, where the mythological characters look us in the eye like seasoned actors. And if you get in the car and decide to get to Sassuolo, you understand how the Baroque was also a sumptuous setting. The frescoes of the Palazzo Ducale are an architecture that leads from the room to the sky. A style, this, which will soon become an export: new solutions are being tested in the courts of all Europe. France, for example, will baptize the manufacture of tapestries, as in the case of the famous Gobelins family.

Finally, the Baroque also went by sea: Daverio takes us to Bologna, Palazzo Poggi, Stanza della nautica. There is the model (dated 1530) of the Medici prison of the Order of Santo Stefano, an order commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici to combat piracy on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Very fast, aggressive, functional ships. The top of the technology of the time, and therefore also the top of the design. Well, these are the first truly Baroque objects in the West. And if you now raise your eyes from the newspaper and look around you, whether you are in Bologna or Rome or Catania, you might realize that the Baroque envelops you. Like a soft fold.

As a gift, the first release of the series on masterpieces

On Wednesday 28 December on newsstands with Corriere della Sera, readers receive the volume as a gift The Baroque marvel, from Sicily to the European courts, first title of the new unpublished series of illustrated books Traveling with Philippe Daverio. It is an itinerary among the wonders of art of all times, in which the role of guide assumed by the famous critic, historian and television presenter who died in 2020. In the free volume distributed on Wednesday 28, after a Lombard prelude, we start from masterpieces by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in Rome, but it is immediately specified that the Baroque is a phenomenon that goes far beyond, a vortex, a mindset, a moral; a will, cardinal and papal, which explodes like a firework carrying its lapilli throughout Italy, throughout Europe. From Rome we then proceed towards Sicily: Palermo, Catania. Then we move on to Genoa, then to Bologna, to Orvieto. We stop in Romagna and arrive in Sassuolo, to then illustrate the export of the Baroque to the most important courts of Europe. 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).