Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful but confusing exhibition at Gallerie Accademia in Venice of glass sculptures by Ritsue Mishima. I say confusing because there seemed to be no commentary with the pieces. I note the show had been attended and there was building work going on so I wondered if labels had disappeared. Reading the advert outside I realised the work was reacting to the Canova sculpture it was shown with and a line of beautiful pieces on a mirrored surface represented her response to Venice. Even though I didn’t know the above at the time I saw the pieces, I found then beautiful and sympathetic in the space. The line of 15 works on the mirror worked well and some reminded me of fossils. However I think my favourites were the small pieces she called Meteorites which rejected the space and colours around them. Closes 27 November 2022  

Interesting  exhibition at the Accademia in Venice of work by Baselitz influenced by Italy and the Renaissance. Baselitiz is the first living artist to be shown at the Academia. The show is gently themed and included new work done for the space. I wasn’t sure I always got the Italian link in the work except in a small room of drawings based on Italian paintings, Although they were slightly abstracted you could see the link with the originals such as Virgin and Child by Rosso. I thought the double upside down portraits of couples, mainly the artist and his wife, looked good in the space and created interesting vistas through the rooms. They were more colourful than I remembered from a previous and it’s interesting how quickly your eye adjusts to the figures being upside down. Closed  6 October 2019

Small exhibition at the Accademia in Venice looking at their Heronimus Bosch pictures and marking the six hundredth anniversary of his death. The exhibition looked in detail at recent conservation work on the pictures funded by the Bosch Research and Conservation Project explaining the cleaning process and looking at new things that had been found in the pictures. The odd thing though was that only one of the pictures was there. The others were on loan to the big show in Madrid. They had been replaced by very good quality reproductions of them. The real pictures will be returned before this show ends so it might be worth waiting to go. The painting which was there was a strange triptych of three hermit saints. Each saint was surrounded by images of their visions, an absolute gift to Bosch! Another showed the crucifixion of St Liberta, a female saint who sprouted a beard to put off an unwanted suitor. Closes 7 February 2017

Fantastic exhibition at the Accademia in Venice looking at the life and work of Aldo Manuzio, a 15th century publisher and humanist. I had thought this show might be quite dry but it was a fascinating insight into early publishing and put it into the context of the time. I loved one commentary which described Venice as the “Silicon Valley” of the Renaissance comparing the changes brought about by printing to the internet. Aldo started by spotting a niche market with the growth in humanism for re-edited versions of the Greek texts in an affordable form. In turn these new versions of the texts revived ideas and lead to painters being compared to Apelles. He introduced the idea of small portable books which were easy to carry and created the idea of reading as a quiet, private, intimate pastime. The exhibition ended with a wonderful series of portraits of people with these small books, showing that they were fashionable items and held as a sign of learning. He also inven...