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Leonardo da Vinci, Jacopo Bassano and Gianandrea Gazzola on display in Vicenza in the name of nature

by the Editorial Team

The exhibition at the Basilica Palladiana is incredibly relevant to this moment. Inspired by nature via the essential element of water, the exhibition looks at the present through temporally distant works. We talked about it with the curator Guido Beltramini.

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A year after the exhibition that brought together Caravaggio, Van Dyck and Sassolino, the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza once again hosts a three-voiced dialogue between the past and the present. The protagonists are Leonardo da Vinci, Jacopo Bassano and Gianandrea Gazzola, chosen by the curator Guido Beltramini, head of the Palladio Museum, as ideal interlocutors to reflect on nature through one of its essential elements: water.
“Water is the tool for discussion, but the subject is nature and how the three artists think about it. For Leonardo nature is everything, it is the only book worth reading. Leonardo is convinced that the artist should strive to erase themselves and become a mirror of nature”, Beltramini explained to us. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in the exhibition there are studies and drawings from the Atlantic Codex and Leonardo’s scientific diagrams, revealing, according to the artist, the intrinsic order of natural processes, as the curator highlights. In this sense, the connection with the contemporary work of Gianandrea Gazzola is clear: by transferring sound waves from the air to the water contained in a twelve-meter-wide tank, Gazzola used infrasounds (sounds inaudible to the human ear but capable of making the water ripple) to give shape to micro-waves projected, thanks to two powerful beams of light, on the sheets hanging from the ceiling of the Basilica Palladiana. An instant before the water becomes calm again, the projections no longer reflect waves, but hexagons. “It is as if Gazzola had been able to show us the visual structure of water,” explains Beltramini, establishing a point of contact with Leonardo’s approach to scientific diagrams.
The decision to include The Flood of the Colmeda, a painting by Jacopo Bassano for the altar of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Feltre and commissioned from the artist following the storm of 27 July 1564, is inspired by current events – and once again by the presence of water. This curatorial choice is determined by the fact that what is represented is not attributable to a natural disaster, but to the consequences of human action. Beltramini explains that the flooding of the Colmeda river was caused by the deforestation of the wooded areas of Feltre to use the wood for the smelting furnaces –Belluno and Feltre, the curator recalls, is where the best weapons in Europe were forged. A catastrophe that evokes the tragic flood events that we are all witnessing more and more frequently, proving how human beings continue to be responsible for the destruction of the planet on which they live. However, it is possible to oppose destruction. Palladio himself was aware of that, having authored the design of a water pumping machine meant to control water that was contained in Tre discorsi sopra il modo d’alzare acque da’ luoghi bassi, the printed volume on display and housed in the Bertoliana Library in Vicenza.
There is a fourth masterpiece that is the protagonist of the exhibition, as noted by Beltramini, and it is the place that hosts it. “Vitruvius writes that the architect must have a thorough knowledge of music ‒ because music has the ability to transform natural processes like sounds into mathematics, in other words, into rational processes ‒ and that it is important for the architect to use the same harmonic ratios used by music”, explains the curator. “Palladio created an illustrated edition of Vitruvius and we opened it to the page where Palladio shows the musical diagrams to remind the viewer that, just like Gazzola takes the music that lives in the air and moves it into water, Palladio took music and transformed it into stone, that is, into the building where the exhibition is being staged. The loggias that surround the great fifteenth-century hall of the Basilica Palladiana are in fact designed according to these harmonious relationships”.
What the three artists have in common – despite the temporal distance that separates them – is the desire to transcribe the natural element into a visual datum, achieving extremely contemporary results. After all, according to Beltramini, “ancient art has the duty to speak to the present. The past provides us with the distance with which to read a present that passes too quickly before our eyes”. And on this occasion the warning is to “listen to nature and get back in tune with it”.

Text by Arianna Testino

INFO
Tre Capolavori a Vicenza. Leonardo da Vinci, Jacopo Bassano, Gianandrea Gazzola
until 9 March 2025
BASILICA PALLADIANA
Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza
https://www.mostreinbasilica.it/it/

Cover photo: Tre Capolavori a Vicenza. Leonardo da Vinci, Jacopo Bassano, Gianandrea Gazzola, installation view. Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza 2024. Photo Lorenzo Ceretta

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