According to the most authoritative accounts, the fifth centenary of the death of Zorzi da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto 1477/78 – Venice 1510), occurs in 2010 and Castelfranco Veneto, the birthplace of the great artist and home to one of his most important works (the famous Castelfranco Altarpiece) as well as to one of the very few frescos attributed to Giorgione (Frieze of the Liberal and Mechanical Arts), is staging a wide-ranging exhibition in collaboration with the Veneto Region, which has set up the Regional Committee for the Fifth Centenary of the Death of Giorgione.

The  survey at the Museo Casa Giorgione enables visitors to admire the masterpieces from the first phase in Giorgione's career, alongside those by artists he was in contact with during his short life,  including Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Costa, Carpaccio, Perugino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma the Elder,  Leonardo, Raphael and Titian.

Major national and international museums have contributed in homage to the great master from Castelfranco Veneto: among others, the State Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, the Uffizi of Florence, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana of Milan, the Louvre of Paris, and the National Gallery of London.

This exhibition, curated by Eduardo Cicelyn and Mario Codognato, explores the similitudes between the cultural themes that are representative of the beginning of the new century and those that made the visual imagination of the Baroque Age so powerful and grandiose. Barock investigates issues that permeated the XVII century and are still distinctive of our time, showing how the typical themes of the Baroque culture of the 17th century have been revived by contemporary artists.

The revolutionary scientific and technological discoveries that day after day challenge established certainties and habits; the great religious zeal that led to the fundamentalism, the obscurantism and to clashes between civilizations which produced unprecedented slaughters: the disorientation of contemporary imagination then appears to be caused by ideological conflicts and tragic experiences for issues that are not very different from those that shaped the century of Galileo Galilei and of the Counter-Reformation. The most obvious similitude between the artists featured in the exhibition and the Baroque Masters lies in the "sensational" images they use, images that aim at striking the senses, at being extreme in their violence, in their sensuality, in their frankness, that do not fit in any category and escape definition.

For example, in Worker (at left), Giulia Piscitelli (b. 1965, Napoli) endows an ancient symbol of the Memento Mori --- closely related in Naples to the traditional cult of the dead --- with a concrete and immediate presence through a tangible object at the Baroque cloister of the Charterhouse of San Martino.

The show features 28 artists: Adel Abdessemed, Micol Assaël, Matthew Barney, Domenico Bianchi, Bianco - Valente, Antonio Biasiucci, Keren Cytter, Mircea Cantor, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Claire Fontaine, Lara Favaretto, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Shirin Neshat, Carsten Nicolai, ORLAN, Philippe Parreno, Giulia Piscitelli, Michal Rovner, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sislej Xhafa.

Starting from the fundamental exhibition organised in Zurich, Berlin and Munich in 1997, Boecklin, De Chirico, Ernst. Eine Reise ins Ungewisse and the essays written by Wieland Schmied and David Sylvester towards the end of the Seventies, this exhibition explores the early years of the career of De Chirico and the influence of his first works on movements such as Surrealism and the Neue Sachlichkeit.

De Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece and partly raised there, where his engineer father designed and built railway lines. He had a prolific artistic career, and lived to a grand old age, almost as long as Picasso. He died in 1978. Having studied in Munich, at the age of twenty-one and fascinated by the work of the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, he began to paint a series of strange and oneiric cityscapes. Displayed in Paris after 1911 they were enthusiastically greeted by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard, and very soon De Chirico became one of the heroes of Surrealism.

This phase of his work – the so-called metaphysical painting – lasted up to around 1918. Subsequently De Chirico changed direction. He wanted to become a classicist – and almost succeeded.

Forty years ago, in May 1969, the special squad of the Carabinieri assigned to the protection of the cultural heritage was set up, which then in 1975 became functionally answerable to the newly-established Ministry for the Cultural Heritage.

The exhibition, set up in the Sala Bianca of the Pitti Palace, is devoted in particular to sacred art, and hence to paintings and objects stolen from churches and convents, and sometimes museums, but in all cases works on sacred subjects or objects of liturgical use. Consequently this tends to bring to light how, for many different reasons, sites of worship tend to be exposed to the risk of theft and damage and how over time the squad of the Carabinieri specialised in this sector has set its resources and competence at the service of the Church and its enormous artistic heritage.

What the selected works have in common, first and foremost, is the very high “quality”, illustrating how even unrivalled masterpieces, which one would think are immune to all risk, have over time been involved in more or less sensational robberies.

As well as being arranged in chronological order, the works are also divided up into panels, canvases, sculptures and works of applied art, illustrating how the thefts have indiscriminately affected different genres. Another criterion of selection could be defined as “geographical”, since because the work of the special squad of the Carabinieri covers the entire country, the works on display too ought to represent all the different Regions of Italy.

Centrale Montemartini
via Ostiense 106
00154 Roma

Melani, Fabri, A. and D. Scarlatti

Concerto Italiano
Rinaldo Alessandrini, director

Steve Reich: City Life

PMCE Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble
Manuel Zurria, flute
Paolo Fratini, flute
Giovanni Cretoni, oboe
Pietro Picone, oboe
Paolo Ravaglia, clarinet
Luca Cipriano, clarinet
Paolo Sasso, violin
Suvi Valjus, violin
Gabriele Croci, viola
Francesco Sorrentino, cello
Massimo Ceccarelli, bass
Gilda Buttà, piano
Francesco Prode, piano
Oscar Pizzo, electric keyboard
Lucio Perotti, electric keyboard
Antonio Caggiano, Antonino Errera, Flavio Tanzi percussion
Luca Nostro, electric guitar
Bernardo Nardini, electric guitar

i chitarristi dei Conservatori e delle Scuole di Musica di Roma

Roberto Cecchetto, solo guitar

Tonino Battista, conductor

Steve Reich, sound director