Uffizi presents an exhibition, “Carlo Maria Mariani. Arte beyond Time” in the Andito degli Angiolini in Palazzo Pitti until the 1st of December 2024. Consisting of around sixteen works by the renowned and internationally recognized contemporary Italian master, Carlo Maria Mariani, the exhibition is curated by Clayton Calvert, executive director of The Carlo Maria Mariani and Carol Lane Mariani Foundation of New York, and the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi.
The art display covers a timespan of over 50 years of the artist’s career from 1968 to 2019, including the contributions from the Foundation bearing his name from the MART of Trento and Rovereto, from the Achille Forti Modern Art Gallery Collection of Verona, from Museo del Novecento in Milan and the Antonio Martino Collection in Rome. According to the museum’s website,
“It is integral and implacable, positioning itself between Canova and Winkelmann, the return in Carlo Maria Mariani, the nostos: it is no longer a return to order, it is the recomposition of a lost world, an anastylosis in painting – states Vittorio Sgarbi. Mariani goes beyond David and concedes nothing to the present. His neoclassicism is reconstructed in the light of Surrealism, in a continuous projection of the dream […]. His neoclassicism is not ideological, it is sentimental, it is Italy seen by a traveler who comes from afar, in his case, who goes away to see it again”.
It further adds,
“It is an exhibition born out of the continuity of Art History and of beautiful and intelligent Painting, that strongly relates to the masterpieces from the past present at Palazzo Pitti, establishing a powerful dialogue in the name of immortality and above all of the eternal contemporaneity of sublime ageless, and aesthetically and philologically intellectual painting – this is Clayton Calvert’s comment regarding “Art beyond time” – Therefore Palazzo Pitti and Florence represent for Carlo Maria Mariani his ideal Constellation of Leo, where he can mediumistically rejoin his Masters who accompanied him throughout his life, from Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, Gentileschi… to his beloved neo-classicism with Canova, Mengs and Kauffmann”.
Carlo Maria Mariani, born on July 25, 1931, in Rome, had a successful career. In the early 1950s, he participated in various exhibitions in Rome, such as the Youth Art Exhibition, the Youth Meetings, and the Lazio Art Exhibition, and obtained a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1955. The artist received numerous important commissions of mosaics, frescoes, and works on canvas in Copenhagen and has internationally exhibited at the best Italian and International private galleries as well as some of the most prestigious institutional venues in the world: Documenta, Kassel; Biennale di San Paolo; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden Washington, D.C.; Museo Rufino Tamayo Mexico City; National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mathildenhohe Darmstadt; Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Frankfurt Kunstverein; GNAM Roma; Palazzo delle Esposizioni Roma; Palais des Beaux Art, Charleroi; Biennale di Venezia; California Center for the Arts; Frye Museum, Seattle; Ostende Museum of Modern Art; Quadriennale di Roma; Art Center Moscow and Leningrad; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museo di Palazzo Te, Mantova; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington: Temple University Rome.
The exhibition revisits the art of an important Italian master of the twentieth century who not only was awarded the Feltrinelli Prize for Painting in 1998 for his mesmerizing canvases but got his name among the most distinguished artists living in America. The art display must not be missed.
Featured Image: Exhibition Installation; Uffizi.