No.6
Summer Solstice 2023
2023 / 126 PAGES.
Language: English, Italian
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