MIRABILIA ESTENSI
WUNDERKAMMER

Name: MIRABILIA ESTENSI
Start: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
End: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Location: Diamond Palace

Diamond Palace

Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

The show

The Mirabilia Estensi exhibition will be held at Palazzo dei Diamanti from March 23, in the rooms of the Benvenuto Tisi wing. Wunderkammer, organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara and included in the ticket for the exhibition dedicated to Maurits Cornelis Escher.

The exhibition, born from an idea by Vittorio Sgarbi and curated by Pietro Di Natale, presents a rich selection of precious, yet little-known, works of art from the Italian Renaissance: historiated pastille caskets, a particular genre of artefacts which became very fashionable in the Ferrara of Borso d'Este involving artists such as the young Cosmè Tura and the miniaturist Giorgio d'Alemagna. These objects develop with a new technique the typology of caskets in bone, horn and Carthusian inlaid wood made between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the Bottega degli Embriachi and their imitators, a production intended for weddings also represented in the exhibition by some examples. With the "pastiglia", a mixture of plaster, glue and marble dust, to which perfumed substances such as musk were added («pastume de moscho» in the ancient Este papers), the figures and elements necessary to compose representations were shaped inspired mostly by Roman history and classical mythology, exempla virtutis that were supposed to stimulate noble and admirable behavior. Conceived as objects for domestic use to contain precious items, but also letters, rosaries and toilet accessories, these caskets, produced in Ferrara until the years of Alfonso I d'Este (1505-34) by several "workshops" (there are seven have been identified, which could however represent multiple production phases of the same laboratory), are among the most emblematic expressions of the passion for the ancient that pervaded the Renaissance courts.

Renaissance caskets and cassettes soon returned to the physical and symbolic "space" of the Wunderkammer, that type of princely collection, which had spread throughout Central Europe already in the early sixteenth century, so called because it was made up of pieces selected and collected with the intention of astonishing those who were lucky enough to admire them. Basically everything, absolutely everything, could be found in a Wunderkammer: figurative arts and scientific instruments, astrology and medicine, zoology and botany, gemology and metallurgy, esoteric sciences and alchemy. The passion of collecting, even "omnivorous" and obsessive, and the incredible quantity of creations collected by those who, driven by an urgency for all-encompassing knowledge, attempted to bring the world together in one room, are evoked in the exhibition by the work dedicated to “chambers of wonders” by Massimo Listri, interior and architectural photographer. Through his images, always balanced and rigorous, we encounter naturalia (rarities provided by the three kingdoms of nature), artificialia (expertly crafted objects) and mirabilia (unusual, curious or more simply marvelous things) kept in extraordinary, Italian and European "containers". , public and private: from the Mineralien-kabinett of the Benedictine abbey of Seitenstetten to the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, from the cabinet d'histoire naturelle of Clément Lafaille in La Rochelle to the Treasury of the Grand Dukes of Palazzo Pitti, from the Museum of sanitary art in Santo Spirito in Sassia to the collection of the Parisian antique dealers Kugel and to that kept until some time ago in the eighteenth-century Malplaquet House in London.