From November 16th 2019 to March 8th 2020, Palazzo Magnani and the Cloisters of San Pietro in Reggio Emilia will host the exhibition “What a wonderful world. The long history of the ornament between art and nature“, a compelling and unprecedented journey through the centuries, to understand how the decoration and the ornament tell about us and the world. The exhibition – promoted by the Palazzo Magnani Foundation, in collaboration with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, the Province of Reggio Emilia, the Emilia Romagna Region and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism – will retrace some of the many aspects in which the action is expressed Ornamental through over 200 works, coming from important private collections and national and international museum institutions, including the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
In addition to some pieces of prehistory, the exhibition will go through more than two thousand years of art history, from the Roman age to the Middle Ages up to the present day, through various sections and itineraries. These will allow the visitor to discover how the art of ornament has been influenced and influenced the reality that surrounds it, from nature to writing, passing through jewels. The exhibition intends to investigate the origins and developments of the multifaceted marriage between everyday life, art, and decoration and then to deal in detail with the experiences of so much twentieth-century art and the new millennium in which the themes of the Ornament were again put back at stake.
One of the itineraries offered by the exhibition will be entirely dedicated to a local experience that blossomed in the first half of the twentieth century, that of Ars Canusina invented and conducted by the Reggio Emilia psychiatrist Maria Bertolani Del Rio (1892-1978), in the San Lazzaro asylum of Reggio Emilia. During the period in which she worked in the Marro Colony, in fact, Professor Del Rio introduced a largely unpublished curative practice, which aimed to use art in the manual work process as an educational and therapeutic tool. The Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, as part of its FESTIVAL APERTO 2019, also offers a series of shows and concerts, which, due to assonance or dissonance, approach the theme of the Ornament, such as Event (November 13), Dall’alto (November 14), Avishai Cohen Trio (November 15) and Kronos Quartet & Mahsa Vahdat (November 17). The exhibition itinerary will also be enriched by the three-dimensional characterization of some works for the blind and by solutions suitable for the use of visitors according to facilitated methods, in the awareness that art is a privileged way of access to the well-being of all people.
ITINERE for the occasion offers different tour solutions and overnight stays, in addition to culture, and food & wine tours to discover the area and its excellence. Here, what we offer:
From Russia to Correggio, passing through Reggio Emilia and Parma
Between Art and Made in Italy. The typical craft of Reggio Emilia
