No.5
Vernal Equinox 2023
2023 / 126 PAGES.
Language: English, Italian
This spring issue inaugurates a column by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, “Mr. PA Goes to the Museum”: the writer takes us on his strolls through the world’s museums; in this first outing, we visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to admire Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Views of Rome. With the same inquisitive delight as Mr. PA, the new FMR is savoring its second year of discoveries.
First, we will be introduced to the Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani and his Neo-Andean Baroque buildings; text by Marco Paladines, a long-time colleague of Mamani’s. Then it’s back to Europe with Lucian Freud’s plant portraits, recently given their close-up by our author, Giovanni Aloi; a brief essay by Stefano Mancuso concludes the article. Alvar González-Palacios, a historian of decorative arts, takes on a tour of magnificent late-16th-c. tables inlaid with marble and semiprecious stones. Documentary filmmaker Donald Campbell shares the stories of a series now in development, Icarus, about pioneering lighter-than-air aviators: the text is accompanied by pictures of late-18th-c. aerostatic balloons, as well as dishes painted with Montgolfiers from the House of Fornasetti described by Barnaba Fornasetti and Stefano Salis. Last, a touching article by Giovanni Mariotti, written in a breathless, unpunctuated headlong rush: an account of the life of the Macchiaiolo painter Silvestro Lega.