Beauty and Ugliness

The exhibition offers a fresh and in-depth exploration of the inextricable link between Beauty and Ugliness from the late fifteenth to the sixteenth century. Curated with great rigour by Chiara Rabbi Bernard and is the result of a collaboration with the prestigious Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, the exhibition brings together over a hundred extraordinary works from internationally renowned institutions such as the Vatican Museumsthe Louvre and the British Museum. Whilst in the early Renaissance the depiction of reality was based on the rigid mathematical canons of the classical ideal, deviation from the model gradually gave way to a faithful reproduction of the True Nature.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the liberation of natural mimesis and the introduction of the’Artifice pave the way for an autonomous creative freedom, capable of distorting and altering faces and bodies. This extraordinary evolution is traced through the eyes of the greatest masters of the Italian and Northern European Renaissance, amongst whom the following stand out: Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tiziano Vecellio, Albrecht Dürer, Tintoretto e Lucas Cranach the Elder. A section brimming with charm, entitled Musas, Monsters and Prodigies, complements the iconic beauty of Simonetta Vespucci the expressive anomalies of caricature and the distorted face, such as those explored in the famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Through paintings, sculptures and decorative art objects, visitors can explore how the culture of the time legitimised the value of the grotesque, ultimately leading to the conceptual formulation of a genuine beautiful ugliness, where perfect artistic imitation redeems even that which traditionally appears imperfect.