Last Tuesday night I attended a concert where Maggio Musicale Orchestra played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony directed by Zubin Mehta. The concert was in Piazza della Signoria and was for free, so it was packed. It was a very hot night but despite the sense of suffocation I was glad to be there cause the concert has been great. Read the rest of this entry »
The Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg owns so many pieces of artwork that they cannot handle them all in one place. For this reason they routinely organize exhibitions abroad and opened a few branches around the world. They have one in Las Vegas, one in Amsterdam and recently opened a third one in Ferrara. To celebrate its birth, Italian Hermitage organized an exhibition dedicated to Benvenuto Tisi, also known as Il Garofalo, at the Estense Castle.
Benvenuto Tisi was born in Ferrara in 1481 and is one of the most prominent painters of the School of Ferrara. He began gravitating around Domenico Panetti, Lorenzo Costa, Dosso Dossi and then refining his style under with Boccaccio Boccaccino. He already had a distinctive style, with bright colors and strong use of light as it was common in the Venetian school, when he eventually visited Rome and met Raffaello. That was a breakthrough and his style dramatically improved, so much that out of Italy his paintings sometimes are mistakenly attributed to Raffaello, even if Garofalo kept a distinctive mannerism.
What strikes me the most in Garofalo’s paintings is the use of light/dark and bright colors to highlight the subject and yet the obsessive presence of background stuff, as if he were shy of wasting the corners of the canvas. Also very interesting the ethereal mood his characters can express.
The exhibition also features a few paintings by Garofalo’s contemporary artists and the ticket includes a visit to the Castle. This alone would be worth the money. Several inner rooms were recently restored and feature astonishing ceiling frescoes and the atmosphere of renaissance lifestyle and parties. Just looking at the kitchen you get an idea of the huge banquets the Este family used to throw in their golden period, to say nothing of the Giardino degli Aranci or the underground Jail.
[Stefano's comment deserved a longer answer, so here is a full post on the topic.]
What is Art? Something difficult to define. Most say art should convey an emotion and I do agree with Stefano on this. There’s no need of understanding for emotional communication is something that usually doesn’t happen at the rational level. Trying to define art is mostly useless. Art just feels.
There are styles and languages with immediate and universal emotional effect. Everybody get the same instant feeling of aesthetic beauty when listening to Bach, even if they don’t understand how fugues work. Beauty is something mostly instinctive and doesn’t even require an artist. You could get the same feeling watching a sunset or a landscape. But then, in order to understand why Bach is beautiful you have to analyze your own emotions, the effect that Bach wanted to evoke, get to the inner logical and symbolical structure, see the fabric. At that point you understand what the artist intentionally tried to do. That’s the magic in art: the ability to intentionally evoke emotions and ideas.
There are styles and languages a little harder to understand. That’s usually not because they want to hide, or select their elite audience. That’s because the “a-ha” effect is a powerful emotion-generating device. When meaning and structure suddenly emerge, after some thinking our brain springs emotions. Take for example Escher paintings, or hermetic poetry. Sometimes even math equations can have an artistic effect, if you get to see the harmonic symmetry behind them. If you believe, you can even think they’re what God intentionally tried to create; his signature.
The greatest artists can combine several layers of meaning and symbolic languages so that, when enjoying their work, you get instant feeling but, if you persist, you can also get to the deeper layers and enjoy even more. I guess it all depends on the way human cognition works.
Yesterday I went to see Miró: la terra, an exposition dedicated to the Catalan artist held at Palazzo dei Diamanti. This was my second attempt with Miró. The first was many years ago - I was still in primary school - the teacher brought us to the exposition and tried hard to make us understand what’s behind the surface of such apparently simple and meaningless sketches. That time she failed. Luckily enough, now I’m grown up. After so many years, watching Miró’s painting had a totally different effect on me and, even if I know little about art. At least this time I could appreciate the message conveyed. Read the rest of this entry »
After having been to New York several times, I recently watched a movie shot in the city. When you recognize places you have been, the movie feels completely different, so I felt like watching some more and next in line came some classics like When Harry met Sally, Taxi Driver, and The Warriors.
The latter two in particular made me think. The New York they depict is very different than the one I visited. They talk about a scary place where crime is commonplace, gangs fight to control their turf, whores tease on sidewalks, walking down the street alone at night is dangerous, and taxi drivers carry a gun and prefer to avoid some parts of the city. Washington Square and Bryant Park were no-go areas for ordinary people.
Nowadays you’d never tell New York used to be like that. As Travis hoped while talking with Palantine, they cleaned up the mess. In one decade Mayor Giuliani and those who came after him made it one of the safest and cleanest places I’ve even been.
While writing this post I discovered after 29 years Paramount Pictures is re-making The Warriors movie and this time it’s going to be shot in Los Angeles. It’s expected to hit the theaters later this year.
Exactly ten years ago, on Feb 9th 1998, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond began the Open Source movement. It was just a different way to explain what had been already happening for quite a few years, and make it understandable for the business world. And it worked very well.
Building on the ground-breaking work of great leaders like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we laid out the software technology that leads many markets of today’s world, entering the mainstream. When I say we it’s because I have been an active contributor of this community and an advocate of the open source concept since the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »
parking lots are stackable and cars take elevators to save space, or when walking down the street you frequently see nail salons with (mostly) women lined up just behind the the storefront, their nails being taken care of. So here I am, back in this crazy place again. First thing I did after hitting the hotel was entering the nearest Starbucks and have a chocolate chip cookie and a “solo”. I felt like a junkie.
This time I’m staying in West Chelsea, just two subway stops from the office and none the less a totally different place. The hotel has been derived from a 19th century building, part of the General Theological Seminary. In fact breakfast is served in the refectory. Believe me, I can see the Empire State building from the window and still I feel far from that in space-time. It’s not a mainstream place and you need to walk three blocks and two avenues to get to the subway (blue line) but rooms have just been renovated and have all comforts for a very reasonable price. I discovered I’m close to the gay district (which is bad), but I’m also close to cool areas like Meatpacking and at least I have a decent room (last time I stayed at the crappy Pennsylvania hotel).
This season New York is freezing cold. Wind can make you cry if you walk against it.
Cooking is hard stuff. There are recipes out there that would take advantage of project management methods. Take for example Cappelletti in brodo, a soup you can have in Emilia Romagna. To make it you have to prepare a broth with beef, chicken, pork sausage and vegetables, than save the broth for later and grind the meat together with parmigiano cheese, some grated bread and a little nutmeg until you have a uniform compound. Then, you make a mixture with flour and eggs, stirring until you get a compact and dry but still soft yellow bowl of dough. Then you make it flat with a rolling pin and cut it in squares 4-5cm wide. Then you put a small take of meat compound in each square, bend it and close it with a clever usage of your fingers, in the typical cappelletti shape. Then you make it rest for 8 hours, to make it dry and solid. Finally, you cook it in the original broth. Since recipes like this can easily keep you busy for a couple days, you should better get organized…
There are countries where it is customary to kiss on cheek while greeting or saying goodbye, as a display of friendship and affection. There are countries where it’s not. The problem is, when you travel you never know where it’s OK and how many kisses are required. As this article points out, the number of kisses can range from one to four, also depending on the gender of the person you’re greeting. Same as in France, Italy has a different behavior depending on the region, with more kisses in the South. To make it more interesting, I’ve found that in Europe you kiss the right cheek first, while in Brazil it’s the other way around. In my trips to Rio I’ve made cheek kissing mistakes several times.
Last night I’ve been to Roberto Benigni’s show in Piazza Santa Croce. In the last few days Benigni has been reading Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, one different chant every night. Foreign people maybe don’t know, but this collection of three books (Hell, Purgatory and Heaven) and one hundred Cantos written in the 14th century is the foundation of italian language as well as a mandatory reading in our secondary school. More or less similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Well, maybe more 
Since they were forced to read it in their young age, many italians have nightmares when you talk about Dante, but actually everybody agrees is a great masterpiece.