For the occasion of the exhibition "Tiziano/Gerhard Richter. Il Cielo sulla Terra (The Sky on Earth)" hosted at Palazzo Te in Mantua, Stefano Baia Curioni (Director of Fondazione Palazzo Te) and Helmut Friedel (one of the three curators alongside Marsel Grosso and Giovanni Iovane) discuss the development of the project which is on view from October 7, 2018 to January 6, 2019.
The exhibition brings together two masterpieces by Tiziano: the "Annunciation of S. Rocco" and one preserved at the National Museum of Capodimonte to which Gerhard Richter has responded with 17 works which recount the secret of vision.
Mara Sartore: How did this exhibition come about?
Stefano Baia Curioni: Two years ago – the work at Palazzo Te had started just a few months prior – I met the director of the Museo di Capodimonte Sylvan Bellenger, requesting the periodic exhibition of some pieces from his collection in Mantova. A few months after this meeting I found myself in Naples with the privilege of navigating my way through the halls of the splendid museum, attempting to suggest a potential loan to be brought to Palazzo Te. Towards the end of the visit, on the first floor, to the right, just behind the entrance jamb, I literally fell onto a painting by Tiziano a great "Annunciation" from 1558, painted by the master from Cadore, for the convent of San Domenico Maggiore and then, more recently, deposited in Capodimonte for security issues. I was immediately captured by the painting: the sweet mystery in Mary's face, the blue boundless sky. But what I was most taken by were the wings of the Angel. In the skillful and dismantled painting by the late Tiziano, two wings, like those of an eagle, stood out with an outstandingly defined precision. So I asked the director of the Museo di Capodimonte if it was possible to have the painting. His answer was non-comital, requesting that I develop a project. I took the matter to the Scientific Committee of the International Centre of Art and Culture at Palazzo Te and here Giovanni Agosti made the suggestion to make confrontation with the cycle of "Annunciations" painted by Gerhard Richter, alongside those of Tiziano, starting with the painting at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, painted before that of Capodimonte.
Mara Sartore: The starting point of the exhibition is the relationship between Gerhard Richter and the canvas of the "Annunciation" at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco by Tiziano, could you tell us more about this parallelism?
Helmut Friedel: During the preparation of the Richter exhibition for the German Pavilion at the 1972 Biennale, the artist visited the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and saw the "Annunciation" by Tiziano (1539 ca) for the first time. This encounter embraced Richter with the impulse to deal with the painting: "I wanted to draw it (the Tiziano) as precisely as possible, to possess such a beautiful Tiziano … (laughs)" To better understand Richter's way of proceeding, it is enough to note the number of the works of his five variants of the "Annunciation" by Tiziano. The canvas in which we recognise the first artistic approach, Richter applied the number CR 343-1, the last one the number CR 343-2. These two paintings measure both 125 x 200 cm while the other three variants (CR 344 / 1-3) measure 150 x 250 cm which size wise are more similar to the original Tiziano (166 x 266 cm). This seemingly irrelevant difference shows that the artist's priority was not simply to make a copy but rather to enter into dialogue with the original. Richter gradually moved away from the initial attempt to faithfully reproduce the work of the Scuola di San Rocco. The artist continued to elaborate "his Tizian" by proceeding with similar pictorial reasoning which steered him towards other works painted in the same period, his aim therefore was not to try to reproduce the pictorial technique of Tiziano, but rather to concentrate exclusively on the motif of the original. The five "Verkündigung nach Tizian" [The Annunciation by Tiziano] are the only Richter paintings with Christian iconography. As for the question about the possibility of finding analogies between the works of Tiziano and Richter, the answer is difficult and this is mostly due to the limited possibilities of language: it is easier to describe concrete things instead of emotions or an instinctive reaction at a sensory impression. Now the completely different pictorial technique of Tiziano's maturity is known, a radical approach that left a deep impression Richter.
Image on top: Stefano Baia Curioni and Helmut Friedel
Read the full interview on My Art Guides.
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