La Vita Nova. Love and Dante through the eyes of 10 Italian women artists.

Curated by Alessandra Mammì

Barracco Museum, Rome

June 9th – Otober 3rd 2021

Versione italiana

Micol Assael – Letizia Battaglia – Elisabetta Benassi – Patrizia Cavalli – Marta Dell’Angelo

Ra di martino – Giosetta Fioroni – Marzia Migliora – Sabina Mirri – Elisa Montessori

This exhibition takes its cue from the celebrated early work of Dante Alighieri and has asked the artists for works inspired by the themes of the Vita Nova: the celebration of love; the apparition and the sanctification of the beloved woman; the union of love and death; spiritual elevation and the search for God through earthly love, but also the cruelty of love as it appears in Dante’s disturbing dream in which he imagines Beatrice in the act of eating his heart. All themes that may be reworked through that visual research that the artists of the second half of the 20th century above all have embraced on the basis of their own personal experience. Then again, the innovation in Dante’s text was actually his autobiographical approach, creating a kind of diary investigating the sentiment of love and distilling it in a literary work with strong visual elements. The aim of this exhibition is not illustrative. Instead, it intends to offer a close examination of the contemporary sensibility of a woman artist and the eternal nature of a text that, above and beyond the myriad mystical, esoteric and allegorical analyses, remains a paradigm of the discussion of love in Western culture.