Following the success of the first Christmas exhibition organised last year in the Palladian Basilica, which hosted a visual and emotional exchange on the theme of time between three artists: two great masters of the past, Caravaggio and Van Dyck, and a contemporary artist, Arcangelo Sassolino, the successful formula is being repeated again this year. Once again, an exchange between artists across the centuries, in the hall of the Palladian Basilica.
This year, the theme of the exhibition - curated by Guido Beltramini - is no longer time, but water, the generator of life but also, as tragic news stories show us, capable of bringing destruction. The scientific project includes three masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, on exceptional loan from the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, among the works on display.
Water was the theme that recurred most frequently in Leonardo da Vinci's theoretical and visual research: its motion, its forms - from waves to vortices, its visualisation of the trajectories of species that enable the mechanisms of perception.
With a visual sleight of hand, Gianandrea Gazzola places music, which normally belongs to the air, in water, creating liquid figures generated by sound waves based on the same harmonic ratios as Palladio's architecture.
In the altarpiece of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Feltre, which depicts the tragic flooding of the River Colmeda in 1576, Jacopo Bassano reminds us that water can be death: a negative force to be fought, with the wisdom of planning, as implemented by the men of Renaissance Veneto, who succeeded in taming it with a political, administrative and technological project.
Three artists from different periods create a dialogue, spanning time, working on an element as common as it is precious, in which life originates.