Curated by Giulia Lambertini (Reggio Emilia, 1983), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan

Since the early 1960s, photographer Guido Guidi (1941) has been using his camera to get closer to the work of architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), his first and most important mentor in Venice, in a journey of discovery that has yet to be completed. Thanks to the original photos, full of autograph notes, kept at the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (CISA) in Vicenza, we take a surprising journey: From the Negozio Olivetti in St Mark’s Square to the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, from the Palazzo Abatellis Museum, which houses the famous Annunciata by Antonello da Messina, to the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, one of the most admired and copied museum layouts in the world, to the Complesso Monumentale Brion in San Vito di Altivole (TV), Carlo Scarpa’s memorial work.

Curated by Claudia Tinazzi (Verona, 1981), Polytechnic of Milan (Politecnico di Milano)

The definition of living space through some projects by architect Aldo Rossi (1931-1997). From the house in the Gallaratese district to the projects that remained on paper for the Casa dello Studente in Chieti, from the Cabine dell’Elba to the Casa Abbandonata, visitors to the exhibition were able to discover Rossi’s progress thanks to photographs by Gabriele Basilico and Luigi Ghirri, original material from the Aldo Rossi Foundation and architectural models made specially for the exhibition.

Curated by Carlotta Crosera (Vigevano, 1980), University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano)

The work of Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini (1907-1990), a great photographer and documentary filmmaker, was presented through a gallery of his photographic portraits, set to recount a life of friendships and encounters with some of the leading figures in the cultural history of the 20th century, including: Eugenio Montale, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Vittorio De Sica, Emilio Cecchi, Alberto Arbasino, Jean Genet and Jean Renoir. The exhibition included the documentary Il Pianto delle Zitelle (1939), the only testimony of his activity as a director, presented in its original version (without the cuts imposed by fascism), which won him first prize at the Venice Film Festival. To complete the portrait, the great art photos, destined to become the privileged ground of Pozzi-Bellini’s experiments, and the history in images of the association with the critic Giovanni Testori, whose vision of works of art, and of painting in particular, is deeply linked to that of Pozzi-Bellini.

Curated by Federica Nurchis (Bergamo, 1984), University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Alberto Martini (1931-1965): the short and compelling story of an art critic who died at the age of 34 but was responsible for a cultural revolution. In a 1960s setting, the outcome of the “fatal” meeting between Martini and Dino Fabbri (1922-2001) was staged, which gave rise to the issues of I Maestri del Colore, which made art history a “mass” phenomenon, no longer reserved for a cultured elite, but distributed at newsstands, without sacrificing a high scientific level and an extraordinary ad hoc colour photographic apparatus. The exhibition included original documents from Martini’s archive and a selection of drawings, engravings, sculptures and paintings by his artist friends (Ottone Rosai, Mino Maccari, Renato Guttuso, Carlo Carrà, Gianfranco Ferroni, Emilio Tadini, Luciano Minguzzi, Mattia Moreni…), as well as an extremely rare oil painting attributed by Martini to Medardo Rosso and letters, unpublished essays, original drawings and photographs that illustrate the friendship between Alberto Martini, Giorgio Morandi and Alberto Giacometti.

Il primo piano di Casa Testori è stato trasformato in una piccola multisala. Nelle otto stanze, in contemporanea e senza pause, su grandi schermi al plasma, scorrono otto film di Pasolini. Ogni stanza è come “abitata” da un film, annunciato dal relativo manifesto all’ingresso. Una semplice tenda di simil velluto rosso è messa a protezione dell’audio, ma anche dell’intimità di ciascuna saletta di visione.

La scelta dei film è stata imposta dal numero delle stanze, dalla mancata concessione dei diritti – una stanza era già pronta per Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) – o dal costo fuori portata richiesto per averli. Nonostante questi vincoli, la sequenza delle stanze è emersa con un percorso ordinato e sorprendente: nell’ala sinistra della casa tre film della prima metà degli anni Sessanta, Mamma Roma (1962), La Ricotta (1963) e Uccellacci e uccellini (1966). Nell’ala destra, cinque film a partire da Teorema (1968), passando per la Trilogia della vita – Il Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (1972), Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974) – per finire con Salò o Le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975).

Room 7

Proverbial rivers of ink have been spilled on Pasolini’s death, countless publications have been printed, and even comic strips have been drawn. It does not seem possible or interesting to lean towards one of the interpretations, to question ourselves, more than necessary, on the instigators or to embrace the theories of those who seem to have lost their senses with grief, so much so as to devote their lives to the hypothesis that it was Pasolini himself who planned his death. We have chosen not to lose the red thread of Pasolini’s pictorial and graphic activity, concluding with a large, indecipherable and obscure drawing. The subject, probably the steep profile of a bare hill, like those that appear in Pasolini’s films, in Porcile or Teorema, is repeated serially, with a few variations, in an ordered grid. The few possible comparisons make it difficult to date the work, which must be dated to the end of the 1960s, but the small sentence in the margin, “The world doesn’t want me anymore / and doesn’t know it”, seems to have been written on purpose to increase all the questions destined to remain unanswered. A similar sense of silence and drama is conveyed by the large photographic portrait captured during a break on the set of Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1973). This silence is broken by a contemporary counterpoint: Pasolini’s clear and strong voice expressing his concerns for the cities and people of his time. This is the second part of a short film produced by RAI, Pasolini e… la forma della città, directed by Paolo Brunatto in the autumn of 1973 and broadcast on 7 February 1974. Anna Zanoli, in her column Io e…, asks some intellectuals to talk about a work of art they love: Pasolini chooses to talk about the towns of Orte and Sabaudia, defending the need to preserve the integrity of the landscape but also denouncing the emergence of a new fascism destined to undermine man more than any political project has done so far. The last word is left to the host: A rischio della vita (At risk of life) is the memoir Giovanni Testori wrote shortly after Pasolini’s death in L’Espresso. It is the document of a total human identification, made possible by the profound consonance Testori had recently felt with Pasolini.

Professor of the History of Medieval and Modern Art in Bologna since 1934, Roberto Longhi held a course on the Facts of Masolino and Masaccio in 1940-41: seventeen-year-old Pasolini, “who looked at least three years younger”, sat in the small classroom. The projections of the plates (the ancestors of the later slides) accompanied by Longhi’s explanations reveal to the young Pasolini the possibility of dynamically contrasting “forms” with each other. It is the “figurative fulguration” that will dictate his literary and cinematographic research without interruption throughout his career. Moved by the profound esteem in which he was held during these lessons, Pasolini decided, encouraged by Francesco Arcangeli, to ask Longhi for his thesis (August 1942). The two letters reproduced here bear witness to the young man’s proposals and to Longhi’s orientation towards contemporary art. As is well known, Pasolini lost the chapters of his thesis in the convulsive days of the armistice of 8 September 1943, having to fall back on a thesis dedicated to Giovanni Pascoli, which was not discussed with Professor Carlo Calcaterra until 1945. From 1951, publishing in Paragone. Letteratura Il Ferobedò, later merged in Ragazzi di vita (1959), Pasolini began an intense collaboration with the magazine and forged a relationship of friendship and great mutual admiration with Longhi and his wife Anna Banti, who was responsible for the literature issues, which came out alternately with those on artistic subjects. Pasolini’s acknowledgement of his mentor would only become clear after the critic’s death (1970) and would take on the dimensions of an extensive figurative homage: a series of at least 16 large portraits, made from the photograph reproduced in the Meridiano boxed set dedicated to the critic and edited by Gianfranco Contini in 1974. In November of the same year Pasolini turned the photograph into a mirror immage, “assimilated into the obligatory direction of the ego” wrote Contini, and began a first series of five drawings. Only in October 1975 would the series be enriched by at least another 12 drawings, made in the house he had built in the tower of Chia, near Viterbo, and carried out in a sort of performance documented by the photographs of Dino Pedriali, who was called upon to become, with his own shots, an integral part of the work.

Room 6

“The world is changing. It is superfluous to document such a serious and extensive fact: culture, customs, systems, economics, technology, efficiency, needs, politics, mentality, civilisation… Everything is on the move, everything is changing. This is why the Church is in difficulty”.
This is the beginning of a dramatic speech that Paolo VI delivered on 11 September 1974 during a Wednesday audience at Castelgandolfo. “What remains of our religion? What remains of the Church?”, the Pope asked himself, noting the advance of a modernity that was digging an abyss behind it. Only Pasolini grasped the novelty of that speech: “a lightning-fast look at the Church from the outside”, he defined it. On 22 September, the writer published an article in the Corriere newspaper entitled I dilemmi di un Papa oggi (The dilemmas of a Pope today) and in the panel we present the copy of the original, which arrived by teletype from Rome to the Milan editorial office in Via Solferino. It is the speech republished in Scritti Corsari with the title Lo storico discorsetto di Castelgandolfo.
Pasolini had never hidden his sympathy for Paolo VI: “He suffers what I suffer”, he confided to the English journalist Peter Dragadze. “What makes Paolo VI likeable is his tormented intelligence: and the fact that he has no external qualities of pleasantness and, indeed, of sympathy, is almost tender”.
As for Paolo VI, his reaction to the news of Pasolini’s death is very significant. This is the testimony given by Monsignor John Magee, one of the Pope’s secretaries, to the journalist Andrea Tornielli: “I remember the day when Pasolini’s death was announced on television. Monsignor Macchi exclaimed: ‘Ah! You see the Lord has a way…’. Paolo VI remained motionless. Macchi explained what this man had done, in his opinion, to the detriment of so many young people. The Pope stood up, there was still an image of Pasolini on the screen: ‘Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine’ – he said, making a sign of the cross: ‘Now let us pray together for this unhappy soul’. That was his reaction”.

In 1968, Franco Rossellini, the producer of Teorema, suggested that Pasolini make a film about Medea, with Maria Callas in the leading role. The director was immediately enthusiastic: he had long thought of involving the famous soprano in a tragic role. Callas, for her part, knew Pasolini as a director and had a confused opinion of him, his films had aroused mixed feelings in her. They met on 19 October 1968 and for Pasolini it was a thunderbolt: Maria was “an extraordinary physical apparition” and he identified her with the heroine of Greek tragedy. Callas is Medea, Medea is Callas and Pasolini wrote the screenplay for the film, carefully calibrating it to her personality. Captivated by Pasolini’s personality, Callas accepts the role of Medea at an extremely delicate moment in her career and life: she has to counteract the many who believe she is professionally finished and she is coming out of her stormy relationship with Aristotle Onassis. The role Pasolini offered her was her chance for redemption, but it was one of the most difficult tests: she felt inadequate, lost, fragmented by the cinematographic technique, so different from the theatrical one in which she was a master. But it is Pasolini’s physical presence on the set in the summer of 1969 that sustains and guides her. The photographs by Mimmo Cattarinich and the unpublished letter in which Pasolini reassures her on a professional and human level document this in an exceptional way. This was only the beginning of a relationship destined to last over time and Pasolini would express his love for her in the ways allowed by his means of expression: poetry and drawing. This led to a large number of portraits of Callas by Pasolini, produced in two series in 1969 and 1970. These drawings are characterised by a strong technical experimentation that deepens the experiences of 1967. The large drawing exhibited here (1970) belongs to a series of eight multiple portraits of Maria Callas made with pencil, wine, glue and rose petals on the beach of the island of Skorpions during a holiday in Greece. Callas’s face becomes an archaic profile in which the inquisitive seriality already tested on himself in 1965, and destined to re-emerge in other portraits of 1974-1975, returns. This drawing, in particular, is made with vinyl glue and anticipates a declaration of 1974: “I couldn’t do anything with pencil, pastels or ink. I took a jar of glue, drew and painted, together, pouring the liquid directly onto the paper. There must be a reason why the idea of attending some art school or academy never occurred to me. Just the idea of doing something traditional makes me nauseous, it literally makes me sick. Even thirty years ago I was creating material difficulties for myself”.