The Vitruvian Man is considered the most perfect example of symmetry, and is one of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, the artist of Last Supper.
Every time we take a 1 € coin we can admire its perfection, but what is its meaning and its origin, and where can we admire it?
I’ll tell you everything in this post.
La rotonda di Andrea Palladio. Image source: MoseViero.it
Andrea Palladio was born in Padua in 1508 into a family of humble origins. At the age of almost 13 he began his apprenticeship as a stone cutter in Padua, and then he attended the workshop of the most important sculptors in Vicenza, Giovanni di Giacomo da Porlezza and Girolamo Pittoni da Lumignano.
Between 1535 and 1538 he met Giangiorgio Trissino, humanist poet and scholar who took Palladio under his wing.
This encounter and this friendship changed completely the life of Andrea Palladio, allowing him to receive a cultural training based on classical studies.
Thanks to Trissino, Andrea Palladio visited Rome several times, and there for the first time he came in contact with architectures he had seen only in reproductions and drawings.
Those trips to Rome allowed Palladio to observe the buildings and to study the materials, but also to meet the greatest artists of his time, such as Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Bramante and Sebastiano Serlio.
You’ll find outside the borders of the Arsenale and the Giardini venues the most interesting things of the Venice Biennale 2017, as I’ve already told you in the post I wrote about my visit at Venice Biennale 2017 to the most important International Art Exhibition. But in that post I suggest that you see Venice and lose yourself in everything the city can offer you.
READ ALSO: Visiting the Venice Biennale: 5 things to know.
Take the first vaporetto sailing down the Grand Canal, and when you are near the Rialto Bridge you’ll see two giant hands supporting the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel.
Those hands are “Support”, an artwork by Lorenzo Quinn.
I asked the artist some questions, so that he could explain me the true meaning of those hands. That’s what he said to me.
Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Panni al sole (1894). Image source: https://www.gognasrl.it/antiquariato
Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo was born in Volpedo (in the province of Alessandria) in 1868 into a family of small landowners. Since he was a child he showed a special talent for drawing, so he attended some of the best Italian academies.
From Milan (at the Breda Academy he would be a pupil of Francesco Hayez) to Rome, from Florence to Bergamo, up to Genoa, young Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo was always unsatisfied with the teachings he got, so his training would be full of changes but also of stimuli which would let him travel across northern Italy. Until he travelled to Paris on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle of 1889.
Image source: D Repubblica.it
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965.
He studied Fine Arts at the Goldsmith College in London, and in 1988, while he was still a student, conceived and curated “Freeze”, a group exhibition which was the launching point for his artistic career and for a whole generation of artists called Young British Artists (o YBA).
READ ALSO: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: Damien Hirst exhibition in Venice.
