The loneliness of the statues of Milan and beyond in Covid’s time

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Just name the Florentine David by Michelangelo Buonarroti, or the many statues in Milan such as the Pieta Rondanini, a work by the same artist preserved in the museum rooms of the Castello Sforzesco, or the Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker sculpted by Antonio Canova in the center of the courtyard of honor of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, to find oneself projected into another place and another century.

From here our journey starts. From here starts again, or will start again who knows – hard to bet in these weeks of swinging decisions – Culture and Art, which actually, behind the scenes, never stopped, even during the hard lockdown.

Statues, sculptures, and the closures of museums and exhibition spaces

Distant, isolated, silent. Even the most admired sculptures ever suffer profound loneliness during the long months when museums and galleries are forced to close. They too, the statues of Milan, Florence, all of Italy and the world. Forcibly recluded, snatched from the gaze and enchantment of the visiting public that habitually travels long distances to give itself the chance to observe them directly, live, up close, even if only for a few brief minutes.

Instead, for very long months only empty rooms, masterpieces without spectators.

With the longed-for return (who knows for how long then…) of some yellow zones albeit still scattered in patches across the Peninsula, the curtain is also finally coming back up on museums, galleries and art collections.

Let a new show begin then! At least there.

It moves, in those places and those cities, to see again lines of those recapturing exhibitions and museums, on days of quotaed admissions, to imagine that after long months of excruciating silence and absence, the public still comes in to fill the halls, returning company to those we truly feel are living characters, with a story to tell us, endowed with a soul and repositories of engaging emotions.

While just in the past few weeks the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, home to one of the absolute masterpieces of Italian sculpture, Michelangelo’s David, had reopened its doors in a new temporary arrangement, Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, in the scenic Spanish Hospital room of the Sforza Castle Museums in Milan, had also returned to well-deserved admiration, alas only briefly returned to public view. Indeed, as Lombardy turns orange, everything is immediately rewound back to silence.

Art and its relationship with the public

But let’s try to imagine them: he, the David, said by many to be “the most beautiful artistic object ever created by man,” is the biblical hero about to slay Goliath, the emblem of an ideal of masculine beauty, perfect in his proportions. The hero sculpted by a young Michelangelo not yet 30 years old. She, the Mother of Christ, in the Pietà Rondanini, is a late work that occupied the artist in the last ten years of his life. The David today is no longer alone in the space of the Tribune, but anticipated almost and surrounded by those plaster busts by Lorenzo Bartolini. We seem to hear the sound of their soft vocalizing…: nymphs, mythological characters, nobles, musicians and literati of the time.

The Pieta, on the other hand, while still alone even when the museum was open, in the recent installation, which arrived with Expo, of the Spanish Hospital in the Castello Sforzesco (a site that has seen numerous other restoration and renovation works in recent years, such as those of the Sala delle Asse or the Ponticella), was finally back in the spotlight that most turns on its vanity, those of visitors precisely.

Already this was an unexpected, albeit brief , sight for us.

Indeed,art, all of it, lives on the conversation between the artist and his work and the viewer. A work, be it poetry, music, painting, sculpture, generates an effect and an emotion in those who observe it and come in contact with it. If theartist’s idea comes through and is transmitted, life really flows in that work. Thus the words written in a book are not aimed at a writer’s complacency, but at finding a reader who will read them, interpret them and draw imagination and wisdom from them.

So I like to think that these figures, these men and women, these statues of Milan, of the Terraces of the Duomo, of Florence, of all of Italy and the world, now more than ever await us, proud in their sometimes painful beauty, to return to us as soon as possible the excitement and rebirth of which we have been so long deprived.

However, I do not want to overlook another great “loner,” dressed up in the new lighting that has also recently enveloped the spaces of Brera‘s courtyard of honor. In tones of blue, green and red, as well as the statues and busts of illustrious or less illustrious figures distributed along the sides of the courtyard, even Napoleon Bonaparte is, or will be ready to welcome us back, as he is about to, in a year so full of anniversaries and commemorations, celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of his death.

“Ei fu,” would say dear Don Lisander, our own Alessandro Manzoni, also standing absorbed and alone in the discreet Milanese square of San Fedele, ready to read us a few pages of Virgilian Georgics that he holds in his hand behind his back.

But that isanother story and we will tell it to you soon, hoping that the rainbow of colors and zones within Regions and Provinces will not move the light at the end of the tunnel too far.

Olivia Campanile