CLAUDIO PIZZORUSSO is full professor of Contemporary Art at the University “Federico II” in Naples. He taught at Urbino, Florence and Siena Universities. Fields of research: Painting and Sculpture Italy (XVI-XVII centuries), Painting and Sculpture France and Italy (XIX-XX centuries). Curator and Executive or Advisory Committee member of many exhibitions. In 2011 he won the Salimbeni Prize for Art Criticism. He is member of the INASA (National Institute of Archeology and History of Art) and Director of the academic journal «Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate».

claudio.pizzorusso@unina.it

Profits and losses of Battista Lorenzi and Cristofano Stati

In 1982 Herbert Keutner attributed to Battista Lorenzi (Settignano, ca. 1527- Pisa, 1594) the Ganymede on the eagle, once placed on a fountain in the Boboli gardens, near to the Madama grotto. Some documentary and stylistic evidences allow to refer that statue to Cristofano Stati (Bracciano, 1556 – Roma, 1619). This sculptor, at the service of Paolo Giordano I and Virginio Orsini, resided in Florence from the 1580s to 1607, and trained there with Giambologna, side by side with Giovanni Caccini. The Ganymede, carved for the Poggio Imperiale Villa, owned by the Orsini family at that time, may be dated to the last years of Stati’s stay in Florence. As a ‘compensation’ to Battista Lorenzi, an unpublished large marble group is presented here, to be recognized as an allegory of Ingenuity overcoming Ignorance, a challenging work with which, probably by the end of the 1570s, the faithful disciple of Baccio Bandinelli engaged in the difficult exercise of sculpting more than one figure «in a single and hard stone».

FRANCOISE DE LA MOUREYRE, is a specialist in 17th century French sculpture. Degree in history of art, Université Paris Sorbonne. Catalogue author: Sculpture italienne. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, éd. Musées nationaux, 1975. Co-author: French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries. The reign of Louis XIV, 4 vol. 1977, 1981, 1987, 1993, Bruno Cassirer, Oxford, 1993 et Faber and Faber London; article on Vaux-le-Vicomte resulting from the Charles Le Brun symposium, 2017, published by the CRCV; Girardon. Le sculpteur de Louis XIV, Arthena, 2015. Co-author of exhibition catalogues: Jacques Sarazin, sculpteur du roi (1592-1660), Musée du Noyonnais, 1992; Bronzes français de la Renaissance au Siècle des lumières, Paris Louvre, New York The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008-2009; Les Colbert, ministres et collectionneurs, Domaine de Sceaux, 2020 (à paraître). Numerous articles mainly in the Gazette des Beaux Arts et Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français. Identifications and notices for art dealers’ sculptures (Steinitz, Kugel, Ambroselli, Quenetain). Member of the Scientific Committee for the future Musée du Grand Siècle in Saint-Cloud.

fbmoureyre@gmail.com

Comment le jeune Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Seignelay, decouvrit en 1671 la sculpture italienne

Louis the XIV’s minister, Colbert, sent his eldest son to visit Italy from February 23rd until May 23rd, 1671. The young Marquis of Seignelay (1651-1690) is then 20 years old. His travels to Italy should allow him to acquire useful knowledge in different art forms such as architecture, sculpture, painting. Colbert was convinced this training would return capable of assisting him in his position of Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi. He appointed architect and theorist Francois Blondel, a vehement adversary of what he called “gothic” Middle-Ages, as his son’s mentor. In a daily journal, which was preserved and published in 1867, Seignelay reported to his father everything he saw and observed. We have here analysed his remarks with sole regards to sculpture. The pieces he admired are mostly from the Antiquity and Bernini’s, but not those of the Quattrocento, which was still largely unknown in France then. This journal offers us a very lively and precise history of taste. We will see how the brilliant Seignelay, who was to become one of the main amateurs of art of his time, benefitted immensely from this short trip.

MARIA ROSARIA NAPPI had a career as art historian at the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities. She studied lorraine and german artists present in Naples between the end of the Sixteenth century and the beginning of the Seventeenth century, veduta and landscape paintings in Naples. She carried out a detailed study of the printmaking matrices of Salvator Rosa (Central Institute for Graphics) and about some printmaking matrices of the Royal Printing House at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. In recent years she has devoted herself to study the sculpture of the Twentieth century, following various projects about Great War memorial monuments.

marvelaventis@gmail.com

VALERIA CARUSO is a freelance art historian and secondary school teacher. She graduated with a study about medieval norman architecture in southern Italy and pursued a master’s degree with a research about wooden choir stalls of the modern era in the area of Irpinia. Recently she carried out a work of cataloguing focused on the Great War memorial monuments in Campania for the CRBC and SIGECWEB platform of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities for Tourism.

valeriacaruso84@gmail.com

Sculpture in the ephemeral apparatus in Naples between the 18th and 19th centuries

Designed to last through short and intense moments of public display, the ephemeral apparatuses underlined the most important moments of those decades that, following the fall of the Republic in 1799, saw the Bourbon government alternate with the French occupation in Naples, while the artistic culture was decidedly shifting towards a neoclassical language. In particular, we will examine the apparatuses erected in 1802 to celebrate the return of Ferdinand IV from Palermo and meant to emphasize the magnificence and nobility of the monarch. These apparatuses were erected throughout all city squares and involved the most important sculptors active in Naples across those years, such as Tagliolini, Villareale, Calì and Masucci. Ephemeral constructions, in some cases, such as the ones erected at Largo di Palazzo, foreshadowed architectural projects that would be implemented in the following decades.

SONIA TORTAJADA is a sculpture conservator at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain. She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Art Conservation at the Complutense University of Madrid, and also holds a degree in painting conservation at the Conservation-Restoration Superior School of Madrid. In 2004 she joined the conservation department at the Prado Museum as a sculpture specialist, becoming part of the permanent staff in 2008. Her primary areas of work are the conservation and restoration of stone and polychrome wood artworks, focusing a fundamental part of her work on the conservation of plaster and plaster objects. She has published several articles and regularly participates as a speaker in educational activities for specialized audiences, as well as in new communication formats for the general public, such as Stories de Instagram. She has been teaching a workshop on plaster cleaning techniques since 2011, the most recent one last year at KIK-IRPA (Bruxelles).

sonia.tortajada@museodelprado.es

Hymeneus by Jerónimo Suñol: conservation of an original plaster sculpture

The Prado National Museum preserves a little-known set of plaster casts that are unique and original sculptures of exceptional quality. The most outstanding pieces in this collection come from the Fine Arts National Exhibition in Spain, that for different reasons were never passed on to definitive material, among which is Hymeneus by Jerónimo Suñol (Barcelona, 1839 – Madrid, 1902). This work was restored at the Prado Museum conservation department. The conservation treatment aimed primarily to the recovery of the original surface, pursuing selectivity and respect to the integrity of the artwork, where a lot of subtle tool traces from the artist’s hands who worked on the cast giving it the final touches were preserved. The cleaning procedures chosen include the use of mechanic means, agar gels, and laser technology. Also an innovative solution was implemented to treat and structurally stabilize the arms of the figure, which were severely damaged.

LETICIA AZCUE BREA achieved grants to widen studies in Museology in Italy (Royal Academy in Rome), Great Britain (Norfolk Museum System), and in the USA (Fine Arts Museum, Boston). She received her PhD in 1991, qualified with First Class Honour, with the dissertation The Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando: the sculpture and the Academy, published in 1994. Member, after sitting the exams, of the Facultative Body of Museum Curators since 1985, Azcue has been Curator at the Ministry of Culture, Deputy Director of the Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and Deputy Director of Cultural Action and Historical Patrimony in the Ministry of Defense. Since 2004, she is Senior Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Prado National Museum. Researcher on sculpture from the 18th to the 20th centuries, Azcue has also worked on issues of Museology and legislation. In 2013 she was the Curator, together with Lucrecia Enseñat Benlliure, of the exhibition Mariano Benlliure. The sculptor master in all materials, and in 2016 she has curated the exhibition Solidity y Beauty. The sculptor Miguel Blay at the Prado Museum. She is currently writing the catalogue of the XIX century sculpture collection of the Prado Museum.

leticia.azcue@museodelprado.es

El talento escultórico: una mirada a la formación romana de Agustín Querol (1860-1909)

The essay focuses on the personality and work of Agustín Querol, one of the most important Spanish sculptors between the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. His genius, work capacity, creativity and dedication made him an essential figure to understand Spanish sculpture. He had the possibility to receive a grant, Pension de número, from the Spanish State to spend four years, from 1884 to 1888, at the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts at the Gianicolo, in Roma. He could then learn from all the models that he could study in Rome, from all artistic periods, but from the very first moment he showed his own personal style, full of energy, expressive force and realism. He received an incredible official support, because he was given, on an exceptional basis, a second grant, Pensión de mérito, to stay at the Academy from 1889 to 1893. All who get a grant at the Spanish Academy had to send each year to Madrid an example of his artistic evolution. He did so, even though he also sculpted some works outside the official regulations, that brought him some problems in everyday life at the Spanish Academy, but some of which gave him the first important award in his professional career, as he got in 1887 the First Medal at the Spanish National Exhibition of Fine Arts. Most of the sculptures he did in Rome are now at the Prado Museum.

LUCIA ROSA PASTORE, art historian, works at the “Corrado Giaquinto” Metropolitan Art Gallery in Bari. She is the author of numerous monographs and articles in specialized journals concerning the southern art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As speaker, she participated in national conferences publishing in the related acts. For the Bari Metropolitan Art Gallery she also collaborated on the general catalogue of works by artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Polygraphic Institute and State Mint, Rome 2005). Thanks to her well-established experience, she has been part of scientific commissions for the setting up of museums, such as the Pinacoteca “Michele De Napoli” in Terlizzi, with Michele D’Elia. As far as museum teaching is concerned, The Self-Portrait and the Search for Identity (Adda publisher, Bari 2013) can be poined out, final act of a project she designed and implemented for teenagers. The latest works include the volumes Tribute to Onofrio Martinelli (Adda publisher, Bari 2016) and Antonio Bassi (1889-1965). Artistic paths of a sculptor of the twentieth century (Adda Editore, Bari 2018). On Antonio Bassi she also curated an exhibition at the Civic Museum of Bari (March-May 2018).

luciarosa.pastore@libero.it

Ettore Ferrari, Felice Cavallotti, Giovanni Bovio and the testimonies of the roman artist in Puglia

The aim of this work is to investigate Ettore Ferrari’s contribution to the sculptural production in the Puglia region through some significant episodes – attributable to a dilated time frame that comes a few years before his death – even in the light of an extremely stimulating network of relationships. In the attempt to overcome, through the use of the historical research, a generalized neglect sometimes responsible for irreparable losses, the investigation was carried out using first of all the archive documents – the dense correspondence kept by the artist with even obsessive precision – without neglecting the contribution of the newspapers of the time, active interlocutors of a lively and exciting debate. A privileged attention has been given to the testimonies concerning Felice Cavallotti and Giovanni Bovio for the deep bond, fueled by common ideals and shared battles, established between the two deputies and the Roman sculptor, and because all three participated, for their part – respectively in the drafting of the epigraphs and in the creation of sculptural works – in a conception of art mazzinially intended as effective instrument of transmission of values and powerful political weapon.

ADRIANA DE ANGELIS holds a PhD in Archaeology and History of Art together with four international master’s degrees in History of Architecture, Architecture | History | Design, Archaeological Sites Design and Standars for Museum Education. She has worked and done academic research at the University of Waterloo / Toronto, Canada, the IFA / Museum of Architecture in Paris, the Centre Pompidou / Bibliothèque Kandisky in Paris, the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. She has participated in history of art conferences in Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Denmark, England and her communications have been published in the conference proceedings. Cited for her researches and essays in several international art catalogues, she has national and international academic publications (one of her essays on the French artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, accepted by La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, was published by L’Objet d’Art after the sudden closure of the historical magazine in December 2002), and regularly writes for Italian and foreign magazines on the history of art and architecture.

adrianadeangelis@tiscali.it

An ideal city, populated only by sculptures: the Vigeland Park in Oslo

«I was a sculptor before I was born», wrote in his diaries Adolf Gustav Thorsen, known as Gustav Vigeland. Born on April 11, 1869 in Mandal, southern Norway and recognized as the greatest Norwegian sculpture of the time, in 1921, Vigeland signed a contract with the city of Kristiania, the present Oslo, with which the town took ownership of all his works in exchange for a study/house, where the artist could live and work as he pleased, to be transformed into a museum dedicated to him after his death. Thus, in 1923, the sculptor moved to Kirkeveien, not far from the city’s public park of Frogner that became the place that housed his opus magnum: a great set of stone and bronze sculptures he made entirely and to which he would dedicate the next twenty years of life. Sort of a meditative and initiated universal path towards the future and spiritual enlightenment, the spectacular and very particular sculptural complex was curated in all its details, even architectural, by Vigeland becoming the largest park in the world with sculptures performed by a single artist, still considered the most important work of art of the town of Oslo.

RENATO RUOTOLO, art historian and archival researcher, throughout his career Renato Ruotolo is interested in the applied arts, in the history of collecting and in the monuments and villages of southern Italy. Most importantly, he has been the first one to study the creation of coloured marble mosaics (marmo commesso) in Naples during the 16th and 17th centuries and the artistic collections in that city in the 17th century, expecially the figures of the Flemish merchants Roomer and Vandeneynden. He has coordinated important works, as the Enciclopedia dell’Antiquariato (Fabbri Editori), has collaborated in many exhibitions dedicated to the baroque Neapolitan art in places such as Naples, Bari, Matera, Milano, Paris and Madrid, among others Civiltà del ’700 a Napoli, 1734-1799 (1979-80), Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli (1984), Ritorno al Barocco. Da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli (2010), Artemisia Gentileschi (2011-12), Fergola. Lo splendore di un regno (2016-17) and Rubens, van Dyck, Ribera. La collezione di un principe (2018-19) and has published in prestigious periodicals such as «Paragone», Ricerche sul ’600 napoletano» and «Napoli Nobilissima».

renatoruotolo@hotmail.it

A monument and a temple dedicated to the Eternal Father: an unrealized «pensiero artistico» by Pasquale Ricca

The Neapolitan sculptor Pasquale Ricca sent to Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies, in 1853 a project for a temple dedicated to God the Father, presided by a colossal marble statue. None of these works were ever executed, but the description written by the artist and the photographs included in it, that reproduce the clay (or maybe stucco) model, allow us to better understand the activity of the artist in the 1850s. A decade when he appears to have included into his neoclassical culture some ideas derived from the Naza-rene brotherhood and the Puristi, expecially evident in the inspiration taken from the art of the Early Re-naissance and, above all, Raphael. To this moment in the career of the sculptor belong the four marble Angels in the church of San Benedetto at Conversano (1856) and his masterpiece Portrait of a boy in the Museo Metropolitano di Bari (1858). These works reveal new aspects of this artist, not very famous dur-ing his lifetime but with an alert eye to the problems and developments shown by 19th century art.

GIOACCHINO BARBERA, art historian and Senior Manager in the roles of the Sicilian Region from 1983 to 2016, he was Director of the Artistic Heritage section of the Superintendency of Syracuse for many years; then he was Director of the Regional Museum of Messina and, lastly, Director of the Regional Gallery of Sicily in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. He has published many essays and fact sheets on Sicilian art history topics in specialized magazines, exhibition catalogues and conference proceedings, with particular regard to the painting from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. One of his best-known publication is the monograph Antonello da Messina (Electa, Milano 1998; French edition, Gallimard, 1998). Sicilian painting specialist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of his contributions on the subject we highlight the essay in La pittura in Italia. L’Ottocento (Electa, Milano 1991) and, with other authoritative scholars, the care of the exhibition Francesco Lojacono 1838-1915 (Silvana Editoriale, Milano 2005) and of the Galleria d’Arte moderna di Palermo. Catalogo delle opere (Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2007).

barberag1911@gmail.com

About Fulvia by Lio Gangeri

Thanks to the recent discovery of a terracotta model, the events of the sculpture depicting Fulvia poking her tongue at Cicero’s severed head, an episode from Roman history, by Letterio (called Lio) Gangeri (Messina, 1845 – Salerno, 1913) are traced here. The plaster was presented at the International Fine Arts Exhibition of 1883 in Rome and was translated into marble in 1886. Purchased by the goverment for The National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, it has been in storage since 1920 at the Modern Art Gallery in Palermo. In spite of some reservations about the cut of the figure, Fulvia received wide acclaim from the critics of the time for its strong emotional charge, thus confirming the not entirely secondary role in the official artistic environment of Rome at the end of the XIX century. Fulvia’s proud figure has precise references with the Allegoria della Politica (1894) of the monument to Minghetti in Rome and with the allegorical figures of the Pittura and the Scultura he made for the Victorian portico (1910).

ANNA MARIA DAMIGELLA is an art historian and has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She is the author of monographs, catalogs, essays on artists and artistic movements from the second half of the 19th to the early 20th century. She has written on Gauguin, on Symbolist Painting in Italy (1981), on Symbolist graphics and illustration, on D. Cambellotti, on G. Pellizza, on D. Baccarini, on G.A. Sartorio, on G. Bargellini, on G. Sciuti, on B. Cascella, on G. Martoglio, on “I XXV” della Campagna Romana, on the Liberty in Eastern Sicily, on the architect S. Fragapane, on the decorator G. Rosso. She has published several studies dedicated to sculpture: S. Grita e il Realismo nella Scultura, 1998; La scultura del Pensionato Artistico Nazionale 1891-1940, 2007; the essays on M. La Spina and A. Zanelli; the volumes D.U. Diano. Arte decorativa e scultura monumentale negli anni Venti-Trenta, 2014, e S. Buemi. La scultura dall’osservazione del vero alla sintesi ideale, 2016. Among the most recent studies are also: the volume L. Capuana e le arti figurative, 2012; the essays on G. Costantini, on P. Liotta and on the works of Bargellini and Cambellotti, in Artisti italiani in Terrasanta, by B. Mantura et al., 2017.

amdamigella.a@libero.it

Giuseppe Renda and Art Nouveau Decorative Sculpture. An unpublished bronze: Ne me touchez pas! or Spring breeze?

The protagonist of the article is the unedited bronze by Giuseppe Renda represented a standing female figure with a pompon dress. The work offers the opportunity to circumscribe, document and define Renda’s modernist, Art Nouveau and Liberty traits, starting from his first successful creations of the second half of the Nineties (Ondina), his participation in the major international exhibitions (in Munich, Paris, etc..), his production of small decorative sculptures, made with the collaboration of Fonderia Laganà and requested by the market and collectors, to the pure sculpture of the 1910s, focused on the female figure. The bronze in object belongs to that period and that typology, and has the particularity of being the blatant and eloquent example of a Belle Époque image that best combines the components of Renda’s mature style: a communicative naturalism, that manifests itself in the open laughter, in the body’s attitude, in the rich and moved modeling and in the persistence of an expressive decorative surplus in the formal structure and in the clothing. The bronze fusion also makes possible to recover the real original aspect of the work, which the plaster model marked by the inscription “Non mi toccare” (Naples, Civic Museum of Castel Nuovo) has in part lost because of a restoration work.

LUCA PALERMO (Naples, September 18th, 1983) is currently professor of History of Contemporary Art at the Department of Humanities of the University of Cassino and of the Southern Lazio. His main artistic research interests cover the Methodology of Art History and the History of Critics, with a particular focus on Contemporary Art History. Since 2010 he has carried out research on the artistic dynamics that take place outside the traditional institutional context. In particular, he has explored the artistic experimentation of the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as more recent artist experiences within the sphere of Public Art. He has published abundantly on the topic and he took part regularly in national and international conferences.

luca.palermo@unicas.it

Vita dei Campi. “A human monument” of Raffaele Uccella

The sculpture Vita dei Campi added another piece in the reconstruction of the events connected to the Pensionato Artistico Nazionale, promoted by the Ministry of Public Education and by the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, that Raffaele Uccella won in 1910. The sculpture was the second test of the competition (the first one was Per il sepolcro di una giovane madre). The sources coeval to Uccella do not present any photographic reproduction, reporting exclusively descriptions of the artwork. These descriptions, together with the comparison of more recent sources, have made it possible to identify the sculpture and to insert it in the catalog of artworks by the artist native of Santa Maria Capua Vetere.

LUCIO SCARDINO was born in Ferrara on 1957. After academic studies he devoted himself to rediscover Ferrarese and Padanian Art of the last two centuries, organizing many retrospective exbitions, attending to conferences, publishing essays, and lecturing on the subject. From January 1986 to January 2016 he directed Liberty house, a publishing house based in Ferrara. He is editor of dozens of catalogues dedicated to Ferrarese sculptors active between the nineteenth and twentieth century, as well an essays about Ezio Ceccarelli (1989, Firenze, Basilica di Santa Croce), Alberto Bazzoni in Cremona, Nicola Sebastio (with a presentation at the Certosa in Bologna), Corrado Feroci and other tuscanian artists. He collaborated to history and art guides to the ancient graveyards of Ferrara, Firenze, Bologna, Bondeno di Ferrara. For some years he has been director of “Libero”, a magazine dense with researches over early twentieh century sculpture, annexed the collection of plaster cast of Libero Andreotti, in Pescia (Pistoia). He lives in Ferrara and in Lido di Classe (Ravenna).

57estense@gmail.com

Beyond the grates and inside the prison of ferrara. Notes for a plastic iconography of parisina in the twentieth century.

This contribution explores for the first time the tragic love story between Ugo d’Este and Parisina Malatesta, wich had a widespread renown in sculpture between the two world wars. In May 1425 the two lovers, respectively the first marriage son and the wife of Niccolò III d’Este, first Marquise of Ferrara, were imprisoned and then beheaded in the Castle of Ferrara, due to their adulterous affair. The two unfortunate characters were rediscovered during the Romantic period, in the wake of Paolo ad Francesca, and Romeo and Juliet, thanks to a poem by Lord Byron (1816), and a melodrama by Donizetti, giving birth to a multitude of paintings and graphic works of art. Ugo and Parisina came back in fashion during the first year of the twentieh century, due to the theatrical texts of Domenico Tumiati ad Gabriele D’Annunzio, and especially D’Annunzio’s tragedy, which Pietro Mascagni put in music in 1913. In Ferrara, this revival blossomed in a great number of sculptures made with various materials: from the plaster of Arrigo Minerbi in the “Parisina” bar, to Ernesto Maldarelli’s wooden table carved with the lovers effigy for the Museum Civico d’Arte Antica, from Enzo Nenci ‘s terracotta for his own musician father, to the marble, ascribed to Antonio Alberghini, made for the palace of fascist hierarch and collector Arlotti. Closes the runddown a bronze “Parisina” by Mirella Guidetti Giacomelli, made in 1986 for the Castle Estense of Ferrara (the place where the lovers’ affair ended), honoring a consolidated tradition, but unexplored until today.

CECILIA CANZIANI (Rome, 1976) is an independent curator and art historian. She obtained her PhD at the doctoral school in Art History, Archeology and History, University of Naples Federico II in 2014, with a research titled “The memorial and the filmic”. She is Adjunct Professor at the American University in Rome, Department of Art History and at the University of Rome Tor Vergata where she is teaching Contemporary Art in the frame of the Master “Art History in Rome”. She is currently collaborating with La Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna in Rome, as co-curator of the exhibition Io dico io, stemming of the archive of Carla Lonzi and her legacy; and with MAXXI L’Aquila for a special commission in collaboration with V-A-C Foundation, Moscow. She was part of the research group on public sculpture in Italy, published by MIBAC on the web platform Luoghi del contemporaneo in April 2020. She is a regular contributor of Flash Art and has been writing extensively in catalogues and monographies for many contemporary international and Italian artists.

ceciliacanziani@yahoo.com

Flavio Favelli, Gli angeli degli eroi. A contemporary memorial between tradition and discontinuity

Gli angeli degli eroi is the project of a wall painting by Flavio Favelli (Florence, 1960) that lists the names of the Italian soldiers who fell on peacekeeping missions from 1950 until today. The work was presented as a maquette at MAXXI museum, Rome in May 2015 and installed in the same form on the occasion of the celebrations of the Day of National Unity and the Armed Forces, that commemorates the end of World War I for Italy. In this article, Gli angeli degli eroi is read in relation to similar cases of itinerant commemorations and memorials that make use of canonical forms of transmission of memory and instigate a ritual performance, thus translating traumatic memory into a symbolic form.