HILARY, 2017 TOIA MAGAZINE # 78 THE OXFORD ITALIAN ASSOCIATION BOTTICELLI REIMAGINED A LECTURE BY DR ANA DEBENEDETTI, CURATOR OF PAINTINGS, V&A ast year’s Botticelli Reimagined exhibition, organised by the L V&A in partnership with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, explored Botticelli’s artistic practice, his legacy, and the enduring impact of the Renaissance master upon artists, designers and art historians. After four centuries of oblivion, the dramatic rediscovery and reappraisal of Botticelli’s art established the near universal acclaim of today. Antonio Donghi, Woman at the Café, 1932 The lecture will look back at the origins of the project, its starting point pose the following questions: Why is art Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Co-curator and subsequent developments. The effective and how does it challenge the of the exhibition Constable: The Making exhibition was the largest devoted way people look at pictures? In a society of of a Master (V&A, 2014-2015), Ana to Botticelli since the 1930s, with mass media, saturated with a multitude of Debenedetti’s current projects include a book over 50 original works. The research images, what do all of these images have on Botticelli and the catalogue of the French underpinning it and the accompanying to say about us and how we engage with drawings in the V&A. She is co-curator of catalogue has highlighted a variety of them, as artists, designers and viewers, or Botticelli Reimagined and co-author of the significant issues relating to Botticelli perhaps mere consumers? accompanying catalogue. and his extraordinary posthumous Ana Debenedetti is Curator of legacy. Paintings at the V&A with responsibility Having drawn attention to a range for oil paintings, drawings, miniatures of promising areas of further enquiry, and watercolours. She has written and i The Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, the exhibition, catalogue and two-day published on Renaissance art, philosophy St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, academic conference, held in May 2016 and poetry and holds a PhD in History of 7.30 p.m. drinks reception, at the V&A, laid the way for more debate Art focusing on the artistic and cultural 8.00 p.m. lecture, on Tuesday, 31st and new approaches. More specifically, milieu of Quattrocento Florence, the January, 2017 Entry: Members £2, it explored the extraordinary resonance interaction between philosophy and non-members £5, students under of Botticelli’s images today, which artistic literature through the work of 30 free of charge. For further information go to www.toia.co.uk www.fcagroup.com www.cnhindustrial.com TOIA MAGAZINE # 78 FUOCOAMMARE 88 minutes Italian with English subtitles Gianfranco Rosi ©Paul Katzenberger ©Paul “A genuine triumph … moral courage and filmic artistry exist side by side” Sight and Sound “Urgent, imaginative and necessary film making” Meryl Streep Gianfranco Rosi’s beautiful, mysterious and moving film Fuocoammare is a documentary that looks like a neorealist classic. It is a portrait of Lampedusa, the Sicilian island, where desperate migrants from Africa and the Middle East arrive each year hoping for a new life in Europe: Gianfranco Rosi enigmatically juxtaposes 400,000 in the last 20 years. Lampedusa scenes, switching between the migrants’ has quietly become the tragic epicentre of daily, desperate landfall, and the everyday the migrant experience: part holding tank, existence of one Lampedusa family and part cemetery. one young boy in particular, Samuele, The title refers to a wartime Sicilian song, whose uncle is a fisherman. about the bombing of an Italian warship Rosi has recorded quiet details from in 1943 in port at Lampedusa, prior to the indigenous Lampedusan lives at the island’s surrender to the allies, and how the periphery of something far more historically flames lit up the night: Che fuoco a mare dramatic and sensational, but the quietly che c’è stasera (“What fire at sea there is telling details are like jetsam, flung out tonight”). Islanders in Lampedusa make a centrifugally. The film does not take a i Film screening in the Lecture Theatre, living from fishing. Generations have grown view; it does not demand action. It simply Rewley House, OUDCE, 1 Wellington up and grown old with the fear of dying at shows us the details, and one can learn Square, Oxford, Monday, 23rd January, sea. The endless tide of migrants has made more from this film than from the nightly 7.30 p.m. In Italian accompanied by that fear a daily reality. TV news. English subtitles. All welcome. For further information go to www.toia.co.uk. To view the trailer: go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=st22_s7BB1I TOIA MAGAZINE # 78 IN CONVERSATION … We are living in a historical context in which we are witnessing an unprecedented, almost biblical flux of migrants, shaking the geo-politics of Europe. How do Sicilians respond to this? There isn’t one answer for everyone. Some people think that the little slice of well- being that they have carved out is under threat; others think that the only way to maintain the status quo is to help and welcome immigrants. There are others still who remember that Sicilians were once migrants and left for America and Northern Europe and that they were ill- Mario Bolognari treated, considered vagrants, mafiosi, immoral. Dante Ceruolo talks to Mario Bolognari The fact remains, regardless of the who recommended Fuocoammare as view anyone holds, that doctors, nurses, TOIA’s Hilary film. Mario, a speaker at the coastguards, police officers, social workers, 2015 Oxford FT Literary Festival, is the translators, mayors, teachers and the Professor of Cultural Anthropology and wider general public give up their time and Ethnology and Head of the Department Secondly, it’s a wonderful film; so good energy, with honest dedication, to help of Modern Civilisation Studies and Classic that it was nominated for the best foreign refugees and migrants. These people may Tradition at the University of Messina. language film Oscar. Paolo Sorrentino, the not understand the full import of what they Prolific author of more than 100 books, last Italian film director to win an Oscar (La are witnessing, but they are undertaking papers and essays, Mario served as mayor grande bellezza), said that Fuocoammare their duty all the same, saving human lives. of Taormina, a mecca for writers and wasn’t worthy of one, which makes me artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. appreciate the film even more. Sorrentino’s When you spoke so insightfully at a He is the former Director of Taormina Oscar-winning film was typical of those recent Oxford FT Literary Festival, you Film Fest, Italy’s oldest film festival, which appealing more to an American audience, described Sicily as a backdrop, almost was inaugurated in 1955 and has hosted in that it rehearses all of the most hackneyed like scenery to a play. Can you expand over the years many stars of international and trite of stereotypes. on this notion? In your view is there an cinema, including Elizabeth Taylor, anthropological constant underlying Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Colin To what extent does Fuocoammare cinematic representations of Sicily? Firth, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, differ from other cinematographic The director Giuseppe Tornatore said that and Antonio Banderas. representations of Sicily? Sicily is cinema and maybe he is right to As I was saying, this film shatters stereotypes assert that. There is a cultural constant: Mario, you recommended this film and it portrays a cinematic representation theatrical representation, reciting a role (Fuocoammare). What were the reasons of Sicily between documentary and fiction. on a stage, being an actor even within the underpinning your choice? Typecast beliefs are challenged because the intimacy of the family circle. In short, an To begin with, the very current and life of the people of Lampedusa, like that of inclination towards ‘cultural performance’ pressing problem of thousands of people the young Samuele, is always and forever as explicated by Victor Turner. Sicily making the treacherous journey to Sicily in a state of emergency: 400,000 “sbarchi” is a hierarchical society, organized and and the south of Italy. It’s a dramatic in the last 20 years and 15,000 people deferential in its own way. Each person reality, new and different in many respects. drowned at sea. This emergency unsettles plays a role and gives life to the character It tests complacently held embedded a static and repetitive tradition and at the that has been assigned to him. The study certainties and assumptions. It’s one of same time enflames feelings, passion and of organized crime, for example, is of the extremely complex challenges posed emotion. Whilst watching the film it is notable interest because it reveals its own by contemporary society and globalisation. difficult to know if you should be on the form of staging or, in musical terms, a Perhaps it is the most modern of historical side of the immigrants or not … that’s what perfect score, well-structured, closed and scenarios we are facing. makes it a masterpiece. complete within itself. TOIA MAGAZINE # 78 Palermo and Messina, or the writers and artists who put down their roots in Taormina, Lìpari and Siracusa. They brought with them their customs, values, and lifestyles to a place that willingly adapted to the new. In Taormina the most widely diffused type of garden you stumble upon is the English one, and of course here one can find the best gin and tonic and Martini cocktails. To conclude, in your view, is it possible to describe the characteristics of an archetypal Sicilian or does this inevitably Simonetta Agnello Hornby involve lapsing into stereotype? ©Andrea Pellegrini A society is always a complex nexus of Perhaps it is this recital of roles that elements and relations in interplay.