The photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Wilhelm von Gloeden and the Fratelli Alinari are exhibited in an original visual journey that underlines Mapplethorpe's link with classicism and his passion for the masters who preceded him.

A tribute to one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1946 – Boston, 1989), in an original comparison with works by Wilhelm von Gloeden (Wismar, 1856-1931) and a selection of photographs by the Fratelli Alinari: an evocative and at times accurate comparison, which reveals the recurrence of common themes. Motifs that cross time and reach us, serving as food for thought on current events and on how art, morality and spirituality change and evolve in their mutual relationship.

The photographs by Mapplethorpe and von Gloeden, while drawing inspiration from the standards of classicism, seem to lead us along unexpected and at times disturbing aesthetic trajectories, raising questions on themes such as body and sexuality, whose echo resonates, at times unchanged, in contemporary visual culture, where censorship and moral judgment are always ready to accuse beauty and desire..

The exhibition

The exhibition highlights Robert Mapplethorpe's relationship with classicism, as well as his sculptural approach to the photographic medium. The interest in antiquity, a passion for the masters who preceded him and the careful understanding of statuary, particularly Michelangelo's work, are persistent motifs in the artist's research.

In his compositions, free from any conformism, the figurative models of Classical Art and the iconography of the Catholic tradition come to life in a new light.

An avid collector of photographs, Mapplethorpe became acquainted with Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden's work, which he most likely had the chance to study already at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to contacts with the gallery owner Lucio Amelio and to a stay in Naples.

Von Gloeden, one of the pioneers of staged photography, in his compositions celebrates an ideal reference to the past, conceived as an inexhaustible source of subjects and suggestions: his unique stylistic sign, which makes him an icon even today, constitutes an evocative reference for Mapplethorpe.

The subjects, the poses, the atmospheres evoked by both artists, so thoughtfully studied in the staging, lead us to the discovery of an unconventional idea of beauty and eros.

The relationship with classicism

Around a hundred images are displayed along a visual path that mixes the works of the authors involved: Robert Mapplethorpe, Wilhelm von Gloeden and the Fratelli Alinari, in an ideal continuity that accompanies the visitor along a journey into the "desire for beauty". In search of that archetypal idea of perfect beauty, of geometric balance, of harmony of shapes and volumes.

"Just as the ancients had gradually risen from human to divine beauty, the latter represented the measure of beauty since then", wrote Johann Joachim Winckelmann in "The History of Art in Antiquity".

The authors on display compare themselves with the measure of beauty, in a stylistic research that unites them in gestures, compositions and posing. So much so as to create a whole with their works, from which an ideal, unique and yet indecipherable, can be glimpsed.

Spirituality, Christianity and icons

The “spiritual in art” has multiple forms. The works exhibited on the second floor are imbued with symbolic and iconographic elements handed down by religious traditions. From the posture of the hands, to the reclined head. The long veil that covers the women's heads and the symbolic shape of the cross, evoked by an uncovered male sex, in a shot that follows the crucified Christ, so frequent in Christian iconography.

Catholic symbolism has permeated the vision of these authors, who, by recalling iconographic elements consolidated in its tradition, approach themes such as innocence, sin and the sublimation of suffering.

The masters compared: Mapplethorpe, von Gloeden, the Fratelli Alinari

In his art Mapplethorpe expressed the search for beauty in its primordial form. Beauty that is not in the subject photographed, but in its formal essence. His photographs show naked bodies, perfect shapes, tense muscles, smooth forms, vibrant and balanced.

Naked bodies, especially male ones, are Baron von Gloeden's favorite subject. Eternal adolescents with waxen skin, warmed by the sun, smooth and glabrous, resting on rough, wild rocks. Arcadian scenes in a Mediterranean landscape such as the one described by Ulysses, while he was sailing and observing the coasts of Sicily.

Mapplethorpe's Dionysian and von Gloeden's Apollonian, demonic carnality and innocent purity, dialogue and overlap, in an erotic involvement and aesthetic satisfaction. The sexual charge is filtered by classicism.

The subjects of the Fratelli Alinari are also naked, but their nudes are not made of skin, but stone. The Alinaris photographed the statues of antiquity starting from a classical idea of beauty, according to a deliberately conceived aesthetic, masterfully constructed thanks to the new (for the time) possibilities offered by the camera.

“To shoot sculptures, the Alinaris take only one picture and therefore the identification of the point of view appears truly decisive". (From: Arturo Carlo Quintavalle “Gli Alinari”).

And it is precisely thanks to the reproducibility potential offered by photography that their images impose themselves in the world as a model, the same model that Mapplethorpe, "the boy who loved Michelangelo", was inspired by.

Classical sculpture (and painting) influenced photography. And photography appropriated these artistic techniques to reprocess them with its own means and language, to give them back, in turn, to art.

What the authors on display have in common is the need and the ability to bend art to a photographic vision.

Flowers

One section of the exhibition is dedicated to flowers, a subject much loved by the authors. On the walls, a bouquet of floral essences (suggesting phallic or vaginal shapes) frames 'Hypnos', a famous photograph by von Gloeden in which a boy wearing a crown of flowers (Giacomo Lanfranchi, one of the Baron's models) stares at the visitor with a lanky gaze, clutching in his arms two stems of Datura (Brugmansia, also known as angel's trumpet), a plant cultivated for decorative purposes with hypnotic and hallucinogenic effects (the anthropine it contains dilates the pupils).

The compositional similarities between Mapplethorpe's and the Alinari's photographs are so striking as to make their attribution difficult.

Focus on: Baron von Gloeden's pictorial portraits

Four original negatives on glass plate, measuring about 18x24 cm are on display. Precious objects that show the technical and artistic skills of Baron Von Golden who would often use large format cameras for his pictures , including the bulky 30x40cm plates which he used to carry with him on the steep and wild slopes around Taormina.

The plates, when backlit , show the very peculiar touch-ups - in some cases tiny details, in other cases proper paintings - the photographer made on the plates to obtain positive prints that had a special and fascinating “pictorial” look. A unique and original trait which nonetheless, as the baron stated, remained within the boundaries of purely photographic vocabulary.