The Golden Age

Golden masterpieces from the National Gallery of Umbria dialogue with Contemporary Art

From 26 October 2024 to 19 January 2025, the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia is hosting the exhibition The Golden Age. Golden masterpieces from the National Gallery of Umbria dialogue with Contemporary Art, curated by Alessandra Mammì, Veruska Picchiarelli and Carla Scagliosi, following the advanced preview in a scaled-down format held in Ca’ d’Oro during the Venice Biennale.

Comprising a total of 50 pieces, the exhibition presents many gilded and golden masterpieces from the National Gallery of Umbria, as works of Duccio di Boninsegna, Gentile da Fabriano, Taddeo di Bartolo, Niccolò di Liberatore, Bernardino di Mariotto, the Master of the Farneto Triptych, Bartolomeo Caporali and others dialogue with pieces by such great masters of contemporary art as Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Mario Ceroli, Gino De Dominicis, Jannis Kounellis, Marisa Merz, Mimmo Paladino, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Andy Warhol. The result is an absolutely unique experience that, in the name of the use of gold, brings together works whose technical, aesthetic and conceptual harmony advocates new comparisons, suggestions and perspectives, opening up unprecedented horizons of interpretation.

One of the more engaging of these dialogues is the one between the Montalto Reliquary, a splendid piece of fourteenth-century French goldwork that once belonged to the French King Charles V of Valois and then Lionello d’Este, before being donated by Pope Sixtus V to his native town of Montalto in the Marches, and the Ex-voto dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia by Yves Klein, which the artist donated to the convent of the Augustinian nuns in the little town of Cascia in Umbria, as his way of expressing his thanks for recovering from delicate heart surgery.

The presence of gold in a work of art is hardly ever a mere choice of form, but belongs to a far more complex array of meanings that has inevitable links to the figuring of sacred art, to the golden backdrop of icons and to a transcendent space. While the painters and mosaic artists of the Middle Ages sought not the representation of reality but the manifestation of the divine when they used gold, today’s contemporary artists, who are well aware of its eternal symbolic authority, return to this material with a different sign, but identical intensity.

Catalogue by Silvana Editoriale.

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