Vittoriano
CYCLE: The Lives of Artworks: Stories, Places, Journeys, Secrets, and Appropriations.
SPEAKER: Raffaella Morselli, Full Professor of Modern Art History at "Sapienza" University of Rome and academician of the Accademia Raffaello di Urbino.
DATE: Tuesday, June 17, 6:00 PM
LOCATION: Palazzo Altemps, Via di Sant'Apollinare 8
Painter to the Duke of Mantua since 1613, the month of his transfer from Rome to the Po Valley court, Domenico Fetti is one of the most mysterious and superb painters of the first decades of the 17th century. Intimate with the duke, he shared with him a sophisticated worldview steeped in Christian and academic intellectual knowledge. At the same time, however, he forged a very close relationship, for the duke's and personal affairs, with Venice, which is documented by sources and artistic literature. In the ten years he was active in the duchy and the Serenissima – he would die in Venice in 1623 – his production underwent a real splitting that is now easier to identify with two different markets: Mantua and Venice. The seriality of some of his themes is justified precisely by this parallel multiplicity of commissions that Fetti could fulfill quickly only by replicating, but with variety. This is not a diminutio, nor a mechanical activity: each original work was guaranteed by a monographic pictogram, a hidden sign, a concealed letter, almost an eclipsed imprint but visible to those who possessed, then as now, the correct interpretive key.
