Leonardo da Vinci. Beauty and Invention. The exhibition

“Leonardo da Vinci. Beauty and Invention” is the exhibition that will take place in Livorno from December 20, 2023, to April 1, 2024, at the Museo della Città (Piazza del Luogo Pio). Promoted and organized by the Municipality of Livorno together with Metamorfosi Eventi and curated by Sara Taglialagamba, catalog Sillabe, it will feature 15 autographed drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the Codice Atlantico of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and the Codice sul Volo degli Uccelli from the Royal Library of Turin. There will also be Leonardo-style drawings and paintings that testify to the reception and dissemination of Leonardo’s themes. In total, there will be about 70 works that describe the very close combination of beauty and invention characteristic of universal genius. In Leonardo’s mind, beauty and invention constitute an inseparable combination, just as the intention of representation is inseparable from the process of knowledge. The exhibition therefore aims to offer the opportunity to immerse oneself in the mind of the artist, deepening his relationship between drawing and painting, which he considers a natural science. Compared to his contemporaries, in fact, the constant and meticulous study of the truth is not limited to theoretical exercises of reproduction, but is the direct result of a miraculous investigation of nature.

“Metamorfosi is truly happy to organize an important exhibition project of Leonardo in Livorno”, declares the president of MetaMorfosi Eventi Pietro Folena. “We have been protagonists of the great exhibitions on the quincentenary of his death, and now in Livorno, thanks to curator Sara Taglialagamba, we propose an unmissable event that highlights the deep bond of the great genius with this territory”.

“The reason for an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci in Livorno.” As curator Sara Taglialagamba explains, Leonardo extensively studied the territory, focusing his attention on the city of Livorno (describing the “Porto pisano”, the 14th-century lighthouse called “fanale” and the 15th-century tower called “Torre del Marzocco”), and Piombino, where he went twice to deal with the fortification of the city.

But there is another thread that links Leonardo da Vinci to Livorno, a story resulting from the 8-year research of Livorno native Massimo Signorini.

It is the story of an autographed grotesque drawing by Leonardo, which belonged to the Livorno rabbi Ilo Giacomo Nunes and was offered by him around 1925-1926 to the director Paul Joseph Sax of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was in Italy for work purposes to raise awareness of the use and application of diagnostic analysis in works of art.

The drawing was then purchased by Sax with the approval of the Italian State, which had been informed of the negotiation and evaluated the right of first refusal. However, director Sax, realizing the enormous importance of the drawing and leveraging the strong relationship between the American museum and Italy, donated it to the Italian State on concession from the Fogg Art Museum on the condition that it be exhibited with the wording “donation from the Fogg Art Museum of the University of Cambridge to the Italian State”.

The exhibition will also have a section dedicated to contemporary art, as a tribute to Prof. Carlo Pedretti, art historian and great connoisseur of Leonardo’s work, in the contemporary section of the Museo della Città, whose reorganization will be inaugurated in January, curated by Paolo Cova, scientific director of the Museo della Città itself. The works in this section, which are part of the permanent collection of the Municipality of Livorno, highlight the suggestions that Leonardo exerted on great artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Dorazio, and Pino Pascali. In addition to these, there will be works belonging to the “Nuova Fondazione Rossana e Carlo Pedretti”, from Keith Haring to Arnaldo Pomodoro, from Aligi Sassu to Richard Buckminster Fuller.