Where and when
Who
Silvia Calamandrei
Curator
Alessia Bettini
Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Culture and Tourism
Sergio Risaliti
Director of the Museo Novecento
Duccio Pasqui
Former Director of the Piero Calamandrei Archive Library of Montepulciano
In conjunction with the exhibitions of two of the most famous sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries, Henry Moore and Tony Cragg, the Museo Novecento is pleased to dedicate a meeting to one of the greatest interpreters of Florentine Renaissance sculpture: Benvenuto Cellini.
One year after the celebrations for the 450th anniversary of his death, the volume Il Sigillo di Benvenuto and other Cellinian writings will be presented, edited by Silvia Calamandrei and published by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. The meeting, which will be held on Tuesday 18 October at 18:00 in the Cinema Hall of the Museo Novecento, will be aimed at retracing the events that bind two famous Florentines: Benvenuto Cellini and Piero Calamandrei. Together with the author, there will be Alessia Bettini, Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Culture and Tourism, Sergio Risaliti, Director of the Novecento Museum and Duccio Pasqui Former Director of the Piero Calamandrei Archive Library of Montepulciano.
Passionate scholar of Benvenuto Cellini, attentive and curious about his tumultuous judicial and biographical events and his artistic career, Piero Calamandrei had collated a real Cellinian corpus, with an exceptional discovery in the antiquarian field, the design of the seal and of the characters of the Academy of Drawing (1563), which he announced in the “Corriere della Sera” on 9 August 1938. What struck him in the drawing was above all the ideographic alphabet invented by the artist, a sort of “hieratic cryptography, intelligible only to initiates”.
The rich documentary collection, in wartime, had been hidden in a country villa, which collapsed under bombing. Fortunately, the documents found themselves among the rubble, and the drawing miraculously resurfaced from a cardboard case in which it was kept, among the upset tiles of the roof. This volume retraces the vicissitudes of the seal, as told by her niece Silvia Calamandrei: “Years ago, I received a phone call from the Archival Superintendency of Florence. It was Emilio Capannelli, who asked me if among the papers kept in the house in Montepulciano there was a drawing by Cellini, reproduced in the volume Scritti e unediti Celliniani by Piero Calamandrei. Among my grandfather’s writings I had never paid too much attention to those concerning Cellini, which I attributed to his versatility and curiosity in multiple directions. It was an opportunity to examine them more carefully and discover that Piero had been a careful scholar of Cellini and a collector of abundant documentation relating to his legal affairs and already in 1930 he had published an edition contract of the artist and writer by him”.
With an introduction by Cristina Acidini, on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Cellini, some texts by Piero Calamandrei collected in 1971 for the New Italy by Carlo Cordié under the title Scritti e unediti Celliniani are presented again.
Even talking about the reasons why he loved Florence, Calamandrei would have evoked Cellini, his competition with Donatello and Brunelleschi and the fusion in him of qualities that seem in contrast: the “red-hot talent of the artist” and “the cold patience of more complicated commercial speculations ”, such as the male and female betting bank, a popular game in the Florence of the sixteenth century in which the bet was placed on the sex of the unborn child.
Silvia Calamandrei
Silvia Calamandrei (1947), a graduate in contemporary history, has curated the editions and re-editions of family works and writings since the 1980s, from the diaries of her father Franco to various works by her grandfather Piero, to the autobiography of her mother Maria Teresa Regard. Translator from Chinese, English and French, she published in 2020 Through the mirror- China go and return (Editions of history and literature), a memoir on her long relationship with China, since her childhood in Beijing.
President of the Piero Calamandrei Archive Library, an institution of the Municipality of Montepulciano, since 2007 he has organized cultural events, literary presentations and in-depth initiatives, in particular on contemporary China and on the Twentieth Century Poliziani Archives, which hold part of the Piero Calamandrei archive.
Her most recent work as curator is Trame di cura, for the Ali & no editions of Perugia, a collection of female correspondences from the years 43-44, between Florence, Rome and Umbrian Colicello.