Claudio Gulli FORTUNA DI CENTURIPE
softcover, 80 pp.– 16x10.5 cm Italiano – b/n e colore, tiratura 600 copie
2023 ©Istituto Sicilia ISBN: 978-88-946440-1-2 in preordine a 8 euro
Fortuna è una collana edita da Istituto Sicilia nata con l’idea di raccontare la storia di un luogo o di un paesaggio minore e l’insieme delle circostanze, favorevoli o sfavorevoli, che lo hanno attraversato.
Il primo volume Fortuna di Centuripe riannoda i fili tra un piccolo centro della Sicilia centro orientale, il borgo di Centuripe, divenuto celebre per le sue ricchezze archeologiche, e un contesto internazionale popolato da collezionisti, musei e studiosi. Il cuore di questo incontro sono i rapporti intercorsi con l’Inghilterra, il secolo dell’Ottocento, e le spedizioni di archeologi dilettanti basate sui racconti di Cicerone e Tucidide. Ancora a quel tempo i paesaggi del centro Sicilia Orientale restavano intatti, simili a come li vedevano gli acquerellisti del Settecento o i viaggiatori come Vivant Denon.
Il libro nasce dal dialogo tra lo storico dell’arte Claudio Gulli e l’artista Renato Leotta che, nel 2021, utilizzando il letto del fiume Simeto come un prolungamento di un ipotetico Museo archeologico, ha riportato a Centuripe le immagini delle ceramiche ellenistiche conservate al British Museum di Londra.
Il progetto è edito da Istituto Sicilia e sostenuto dalla Fondazione Elpis in occasione di Una Boccata d’Arte 2021.
Claudio Gulli (Palermo, 1987) ha studiato Storia dell’arte all’Università degli studi di Siena e alla Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Fra 2009 e 2011, ha lavorato al Département des Peintures del Louvre: i suoi contributi su Leonardo da Vinci hanno riguardato la fortuna letteraria del San Giovanni Battista (Skira, 2009) e della Sant’Anna di Leonardo da Vinci (Officina Libraria, 2011), nel 2021 pubblica “La collezione Chiaramonte Bordonaro” collezione della Palermo di fine Ottocento (Officina Libraria. A partire dal 2016, lavora a Palazzo Butera, di cui è attualmente direttore. Ha seguito il restauro dell’edificio, il trasferimento dall’Inghilterra della collezione di Francesca e Massimo e Valsecchi e l’allestimento delle aree espositive a Palermo.
immagini:
The Trustees of the British Museum, London
Una Boccata d’Arte 2021, Eros e Psiche, Centuripe.
in copertina:
Eros e Psiche, terracotta 200 BC-100 BC
The Trustees of the British Museum, London
SICILIA Rivista di Teoria del Paesaggio, Arte ed Epistemologie Meridionali. Journal on the Theory of Landscape, Art and Southern Epistemologies.
Numero Pilota
Texts by Sofia Gotti, Christian Greco, Claudio Gulli
Renato Leotta and Pietro Scammacca. Softcover. 160 pp, 24x32 cm
English/Italiano
colore / tiratura 1000 copie 2022 ©IstitutoSicilia, Acireale
ISBN: 978-88-946440-0-5
Euro 20
Towards New Ecologies of Knowledge
Sofia Gotti
“During the eighteenth century, the dominant methodology of collecting in Europe had already began to shift away from the well-known rubrics of the cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer), popular since the beginning in the sixteenth century. Typically, cabinets of curiosities contained objects of the most disparate kinds, gathered without definitive criteria. In this framework, natural elements, from fossils to taxidermy, were collected because of their exotic provenance, often thought of as magical and other-worldly. For example, this was the case with narwhal tusks, thought to be unicorn horns.”
The Material Culture
Christian Greco
“In a world absorbed by an increasingly digital and digitized culture, in which globalization and the speed of change tend to crush the historical perspective, transforming the past into a hypertrophic history of the present, museums, and archaeological ones in particular, must aim to illuminate the most salient phases of civilization by enhancing the specificities of material culture. By material culture we mean all the visible and concrete aspects of a culture: artifacts from residential contexts, objects of daily life used in work activities, but also in religious practice and production activities.”
Claudio Gulli
In a wax portrait stowed away in the Castello Ursino’s storage depots, Ignazio Paternò Castello, V Prince of Biscari presents himself to would-be viewers exactly as he wanted to be remembered: winking, with a sly smile and a short beard. Perhaps, he’s pictured just after having speculated on an Ancient Greek coin, serene and content as is he. This portrait of Ignazio captures his jovial character that enchanted guests who visited him in Sicily. For those travelling to the eastern side of the island in the second half of the eighteenth century, a visit to the Museo Biscari was as mandatory as seeing the craters of the Etna.
The experience of research and discussion that the publication of this journal aims to instigate stems from the desire to collect and share reflections on Sicilian matters, imagining the island as a fluctuating entity that ideally traverses the space and time of the Mediterranean. A circumscribed geography, but one that is under constant redefinition by human and non-human, mythological and real components. An island, that, beyond the drifts of the summer season, celebrates complex cultural ecologies that construct and deconstruct the relations between nature and identity, the global and the indigenous.
The Post-Seismic Museum
Pietro Scammacca
“After visiting the Museo Biscari in 1781 the French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu remained unimpressed by the museum’s collection of natural history which he described as “without order, without method”, as an amassed exposition of elements in which “the productions of Sicily are scattered amongst those of other countries, very few of which are worthy of attention.” A few years later Vivant Denon, the first director of the Louvre, would visit the Museo Biscari and the Museo dei Benedettini only to conclude that the collecting practices in Catania where comparable to the “impulse of an ant, who collects and accumulates without choosing.” The lamentations from the acclaimed geologist and the father of modern Egyptology point to the Museo Biscari’s incompatibility with French grand goût, the evolving taxonomic principles of the time, and Northern European museological canons.
©Istituto Sicilia