Metamemoria

The homage for 2023 to the city of Turin and Piedmont, which host Flashback, is given by a selection of old master drawings by Piedmontese artists, who then extended their fame beyond the regional border, working throughout the Italy. In particular, a Study of a Seated Man (charcoal and chalk on paper, datable between 1738 and 1742) by the Turin artist Claudio Francesco Beaumont who, after various commissions and works in other Italian cities including Bologna, Rome and Venice, returns in Turin where he already enjoyed such great consideration and fame that he received pictorial commissions at the Palazzo Reale. Among the works he created for the Palace there are the frescoes of the Royal Armoury, the now so-called Beaumont Gallery, of which our drawing represents a preparatory sketch for one of the figures of the Ignudi of the vault.

Florentine primitive art is instead represented by an imposing and dramatic Crucifixion from the workshop of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini (documented in Florence between 1368 and 1414), a Florentine master active at the end of the fourteenth century who made the Giottesque pictorial tradition his point of strength, re-proposing iconographic and stylistic models created at the beginning of the century by Giotto and his closest collaborators, including Bernardo Daddi. The theme of the crucifixion of Christ, which is sadly witnessed by his mother Mary and the beloved apostle John, is made more dramatic by the figures of the angels who despair and collect the blood that flows copiously from the wounds of the hands and side of the Savior and the the tragic effect is amplified by the black background of the table.

The theme of this eleventh edition of Flashback is Metamemory, the art of memory, investigating the conscious use of memory in the daily exercise of life. This is made possible through art and, for us in particular, thanks to old masters painting which today more than ever reminds us how much we need our roots in order not to get lost.