The Seeing Body
This volume as well as the exhibition it accompanies, which is part of the Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tutto è santo project and will be held at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica (Palazzo Barberini) in Rome, investigates what we may call “Pasolinian imagery” by focusing on a series of questions, such as: What is Pasolini’s influence on today’s visual culture? To what extent are our observations of past works, their interpretation, and the impressions they elicit indebted to a manner of seeing, an “optical subconscious” of sorts, that Pasolini’s esthetics and ideology contributed to shaping?
This intellectual’s rich, complex, layered gaze has in fact conditioned and stimulated our collective view of certain works, of figurative subjects as well as artists, from the Italian “Primitives” such as Giotto to the Mannerists like Caravaggio.
This volume will give voice to the exhibition, connecting a selection of paintings from the Gallerie Nazionali as well as other national and international museums to photographs, audio samples, and texts, in an ideal and dynamic “montage” that will shed light upon a visual device—in which Pasolini adopted Auerbach’s point of view—full of anticipations and retrospectives, survival and defiance, as well as transformations of meaning and long-lasting effects.
Michele Di Monte is an art historian and the director of the educational department of the Gallerie Nazionali d’Arte Antica di Roma, Palazzo Barberini e Galleria Corsini. He teaches Esthetic and Museum Communication in the Master of Art at LUISS (Rome).
Exhibition
Rome, Palazzo Barberini | October 28, 2022 – February 12, 2023
PIER PAOLO PASOLINI. TUTTO È SANTO
5 Continents Editions is the publishing partner of an important series of exhibitions: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Tutto è Santo (Everything Is Sacred). This project will involve three different museums in Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Palazzo Barberini, and Museo MAXXI. Its goal is to explore a theme dear to Pasolini—sacredness—with a multidisciplinary approach that will shed a light on his main characteristics as a writer, director, and artist.
This important project, the title of which refers to a quote from the movie Medea (1969) in which the wise Chiron speaks of the mysterious sacredness of the world (of the world of the archaic, deeply religious underclass as opposed to the heroes of the rational, laic, bourgeois world), will be a conclusion to the year of celebrations organized on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth (Bologna, March 5, 1922 – Rome, November 2, 1975).
Each venue will adopt a specific approach, using different media, themes, original works, and archive documents, with the awareness of being part of a broader perspective that has the purpose of introducing an unprecedented reflection on Pasolini’s production and the cultural influence he exerted.