This summertime issue of FMR braids cultural and artistic threads, in a conversation spanning time and geography. East meets West, Andean tapestries evoke Penelope at her loom, young British aristos ride south into Antiquity, a venturesome scholar explores Provence’s pre-Impressionist history, and Serafini, Emperor of Imagination, evokes worlds unimaginable. FMR weaves past with present and, as both Socrates of Athens and The Cranberries of Limerick might have put it, there’s no need to argue.
We start our summer journey with the Roman home of Luigi Serafini, visionary creator of the Codex Seraphinianus: Giorgio Villani guides us, with essays by Justin Taylor and Laurel Saint Pierre; next, the Grand Tour, narrated by Nick Foulkes and Fernando Mazzocca, with a final embroidery by Pietro Mercogliano: a refreshing side dish is a collection of cameos of the era, the “zolfi”; back to the contemporary world with Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral: Giorgio Antei offers an appreciation; Giuseppe Maino takes us back three centuries, as Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione becomes court painter to China’s Emperor: his renowned paintings on silk, but also two little-known works from before his journey East. We end the issue with a trip to Provence, narrated by Gabriele Reina and illuminated with a triptych by Nicolas Froment; Giovanni Mariotti tells us of the Tarasque, the Rhône Valley’s man-eating dragon. In the Hors d-Oeuvres, Pamuk’s
HORS D'ŒUVRE
“Mr. PA Goes to the Museum” – My Suit Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
“Auctions” – Consider the Cookbook
by Massimo Navoni
“Ephemera” – Enigmatic and Unremembered
by Cristian Valenti
DOMUS SERAPHINIANA by Giorgio Villani, Justin Taylor and Laurel Saint Pierre photography by Massimo Listri The Roman home of Luigi Serafini, the visionary author of the Codex Seraphinianus.
GRAN TURISM IN A COACH AND SIX by Nick Foulkes and Fernando Mazzocca, Pietro Mercogliano photography by Massimo Listri The entirely European phenomenon of the Grand Tour, illustrated with a collection of sulfur-based cameos known as “zolfi.”
DREAM WIEVER OF THE ANDES by Giorgio Antei photography by Diego Amaral Ceballos In praise of the Andean Penelope, the Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral, the golden spiderwoman of the Andes.
LANG SHIH-NING by Giuseppe Maino Giuseppe Castiglione, an eighteenth-century Jesuit painter and missionary in China, is now considered one of the glories Chinese national art.
PROVENZA, THE SEA AND THE SOIL by Gabriele Reina, Giovanni Mariotti A journey through Provence, complete with a triptych by Nicolas Froment and legends concerning the Tarasque, il drago antropofago del Rodano.