Camera Italia is an exhibition conceived and curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio for VISTAMARE. The show is an attempt to follow a line in the development of Italian art to highlight how, in this country, there has always been an ingrained idea of room, chamber, place. In fact, no other nation boasts a similar continuity of artistic rooms. Looking back we can start out from the frescoed rooms of Pompeii, to then pass through those of the churches of the Byzantine epoch including the mosaics of Ravenna, and then on to the great fresco cycles, both secular (the Good and Bad Government of Sienna) and religious, like those of Giotto in Assisi or Padua. Further along down the same route there are very many examples: one might think of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Raphael, Pontormo, Carracci, Tiepolo and so on, until Futurist thinking places the viewer at the centre of the work with the interiors created by Balla. Here we have cited only a few examples, but there are many others that could be added to the list. One could say that art, in this sense, speaks Italian. In fact when art starts to speak other languages becoming point of reference, for example, in France, it climbs down from the walls and poses on the easel, it moves outside, en plein air, preparing itself to enter into the modern system of galleries and museums, which takes shape with the social transformation in act that witnesses the advance of the middle classes and their economic/mercantile conception of society. Nonetheless there will be further attempts to regain the idea of the room, of the artistic space, beyond the market system, as, for example, is demonstrated by some of Fontana’s environments, and as this exhibition aims to highlight, pointing at a specifically Italian reality that has become international. This concept will be underlined not just in the reproductions of the rooms being shown and in the photographs published in the accompanying book/catalogue, but also in the introductory essays by Laura Cherubini, Luigi Ficacci and by the exhibition curator, in critical essays on the work of each artist by Alessandro Rabottini and in the artists’ biographies written by Benedetta Spalletti, as well as interviews with the artists in which each reflects on the work of another artist, of his choice, from the past.
So: Carla Accardi talks about Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican Stanze, Mario Airò reflects on Pontormo’s drawings for the frescoes in San Lorenzo in Florence, Vanessa Beecroft on Giò Ponti’s office for the president of the Ferraia in Rome, Enzo Cucchi on Giotto’s Assisi frescoes, Alberto Garutti on Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, Alessandro Mendini on the interiors of Giacomo Balla, Michelangelo Pistoletto on Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, Daniele Puppi on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Ettore Spalletti on Perugino’s Sala del Cambio in Perugia.