Art

Beneath the eternal sky of Venice, with its narrow alleyways and meandering canals, lies a captivating story, the story of a man whose creativity traversed the waters of time like a gondola on the lagoon. Hugo Pratt, a multifaceted artist, painted a world of adventures with words and drawings through his indomitable character, Corto Maltese, but there was another love he nurtured in his heart: Venice.The city of wonders, with its ancient stones and centuries-old stories, had enchanted Pratt's wandering soul. This man, a poet with a pencil, explored every hidden nook and toasted in smoky taverns with friends. But…

Josef Sudek, the poet of black-and-white photography, stands out as an emblematic figure in the history of artistic photography. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1896, Sudek lived through an era of profound historical and cultural transformations, witnessing through his art the evolution of Prague, the city he loved and immortalized in his shots from the period between the World Wars until the 1970s.Sudek's photography is distinguished by an almost monastic sensitivity and discretion, an approach that allowed him to observe and capture the surrounding reality with rare intimacy. His images, characterized by extraordinary sharpness and depth, were carved in the light…

At the zenith of the Renaissance, where art intertwines with mythology and spirituality, a painting emerges that encapsulates the essence of love in every shade: "Venus and Cupid Mingente" by Lorenzo Lotto. This work, steeped in symbolism and allegory, is a hymn to the celebration of amorous union, a masterpiece that defies the passage of time.The artist, a true alchemist of colors and shapes, weaving together pagan classicism and Christian values, brings to life an Eros as a grape harvester who, with an irreverent but symbolically loaded gesture, showers the goddess Venus. This act, which might be mistaken for a…

In the fabric of art history, there are strands that, like hidden gold threads in a weave, await discovery and appreciation. Orientalist painting is one of these: a genre that, while never forming a unified movement, has woven a visual narrative that deeply influenced the European perception of distant and mysterious lands.This artistic genre came to life at the end of the eighteenth century, a period when Europe was expanding beyond its borders with insatiable curiosity. The military expedition to Egypt in 1798, initiated by Napoleon, was not only a conquest of lands but also of knowledge. With the troops…

In the silence of my studio, where the first lights of dawn begin to dance on the walls, my gaze falls again on the post I had dedicated to the symbolism of the fly in Renaissance and Flemish painting. That text, which had explored the brushstrokes of famous artists, now seems to be only the prelude to a more personal and profound discovery, finding its epiphany in the works of Antonio Ligabue, the instinctive painter whose life was never touched by scholarly culture.His self-portraits emerge from memory, vivid and unsettling. In the first, a fly is precisely positioned on the…

"Madonna con Bambino" di Carlo Crivelli (1430-1495) In the collective imagination woven through the centuries, the fly has landed with its slender legs on the canvas of art history, weaving a subtle thread between the sacred and the profane. In Renaissance and Flemish painting, this insect is not a mere detail: it's a symbol laden with meanings, a messenger of profound concepts ranging from death to transcendence.In the cultural context of the Chaldeans, Philistines, Phoenicians, and Hebrews, the fly took on the aspect of Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, an entity evoking images of corruption and decay. This figure…