A show highlighting the majesty of
15th-century art and dress through textiles as symbols of power
will go on display at the Casa del Giorgione Museum in
Castelfranco Veneto beginning October 27.
The museum dedicated to the Venetian painter will showcase
fabrics such as velvet, satin, silk, as well as brocades and
symbolic objects representing the world as seen through the
artist's political and allegorical renderings.
The show's itinerary culminates in a visit to the city's
Duomo cathedral, which houses the famed 1504 Giorgione panel
titled "Madonna and Child Between St. Francis and St. Nicasius",
commonly known as the Castelfranco Madonna.
The exhibition, titled "The Storylines of Giorgione", is
sponsored by the City of Castelfranco Veneto with the support of
the Italian Culture Ministry (MiBAC) and the Veneto Museum
System Association, and is curated by Danila Dal Pos.
The show examines two historical tracks - art and textiles -
to follow the evolution of Italian and European dress across two
centuries, from 1500 to 1700.
Allegory is an important key to the show, starting with the
Castelfranco Madonna, which is both a devotional artwork as well
as a political one, given the rich fabrics used to dress the
Virgin Mary and baby Jesus in the painting and the surrounding
saints.
Dal Pos said in that painting, nothing is "only" what it
seems, beginning with the five different textiles that Giorgione
represents in a stunningly lifelike way.
She said the aim of the painting was to send a precise
message to reassure the Venetian Senate that the painting's
commissioner, the nobleman Tuzio Costanzo (whose father was the
vice king of the island of Cyprus), planned to permanently
settle with his assets in Castelfranco and not Cyprus.
Giorgione therefore created a painting for private devotion,
with a chess-board floor opening onto a landscape, a red velvet
curtain draped behind St. Nicasius and St. Francis and
separating them from the outdoors behind.
Other artists in the exhibition include Lotto, Titian, Jacopo
Bassano, Paolo Veronese and many other painters of the time,
along with textiles in the form of original period dresses,
bodices, gloves and purses on loan from Venice's Mocenigo
Palace.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA