Franco Maria Ricci (1937–2020)

** Bomarzo:
To Andrew Marvell a garden was an earttly paradise: "Annihilating all that's made/ To a geen thought in a green shade". But the garden of Bormozo in the Roman countryside is a disturb ing experience. Gigantic creatures carved from local stone inhabit teh grouns, engaging in terrible combat or staring from weedy ponds. Thier creator was the sixteenth-century duke, Pier Francisco Orsini, according the legend an embittered hunchback. Edmund Wilson describes his journey to Bomarzo, show more while Robert Harbison ponders the shifting meanings of a garden in wich "derangement is normal and balance impossible." An excerpt from Manuel Mujica-Lainez's novel 'Bomarzo' invokes the spirit of Orsini.
** People of Constantonople:
In the 1840s Amadeo, fifth Count Preziosi, responded tot the lure of the Ottoman Empire, as did many Western Europeans, and settled in Constantinople just in time to record a way of life that was fast disappearing. For the next forty years he produced accurated en sensitive portraits that reflectes the enormous cultural diversity of the Empire's cap[ital. Preziosi's sympathic watercolorsa were supplanted by the invention of photography, but his subjects - staring out at us with their lively, exotic, and yet familiar faces - possess a feshness and truth never captured by the early photographers.
** The gentle genre
Women painters in the seventeenth century were expected to work in genres considered minor: portrait, still life, miniature - the sort of painting that could be pursued at home. Giovanna Garzoni dutifully produces copies of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, but her miniature portraits, her enderings of flowers and fruit and animals - often arresting in their severity - still have a fresh presence that explains her immense popularity in her own days and makes her long, subsequent neglect all the more mysterious.
** The choirstalls of San Quirico
The traveler in Italy is first enchated by the masterpieces of painting that fill her museums and churches. With time he finds other and subtler enchantments: the birds and flowers of semiprecious stones inlaid on tables or the calm line of arches framing a courtyard. To these rarified delights belong the wooden intarsia choirstalls of San Quirico in Siena. Their workmanship still charms us - the golden finish of the grain, the ingenious perspective, the patient skill with which obdurate wood is made to mimic the fluid curves of plants or curling hair. They were comminssioned in 1483 from a Sienese craftsman, but their inventive composition suggeests that a master painter furnished the design. show less

** Bon voyage!
"What grown-up child does not remember with a pang the strange at-homeness in the train, the dance of lights in the night, the sound of clanking chains, the clash of buffers, the refrain of a sentence endlessly repeated by the hammering rythm of the wheels?" Victor Brombert's tribute to the power and poetry of the railroad is accompanies by watercolor degigns for train stations, revealing the grandiose vision of nineteenth-century architects. Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a show more reminiscence first discovered and published by Franco Maria Ricci in his book 'Le Cattedrali del Vapore', gives an impressionistic view of his life in terms of trains. And Elio Vittorini contributes a haunting portrait of a couple traveling through rural Sicily.
** A fly in the pigment
The fly has long held an honored place in literature, its annoying omnipresence prompting not only casual slaughter but philosophical reflection: "Am I not/ A fly like thee?" queried William Blake. John Donne, when disturbed by a fly, declared "I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly." But literature is not the only art form invaded by the fly - painters have depicted the small insect in a variety of poses. It appaers, with bland inconsequence, on the shoulder of an ascetic, the back of a cherub, the knee of the Virgin. André Chastel and Giorgio Manganelli ponder the mysterious role of the fly in art.
** De Chirico City
Both Italian, both recently deceased, a great painter and a great writer, Giorgio de Chirico and Italo Calvino link their names in these pages dominated by silent presences. Calvino's text, delivered as a lecture in 1983 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, is the account of a voyage inside the paintings of de Chirico: the writer imagines having crossed the disturbing threshold that divides the world on this side of the canvas from the world on the other. Now that Calvino has crossed another threshold, even more disturbing, this report of a solitary voyage through the mysterious cities of thought acquires a sad intensity, particulary for the publisher and editors of this magazine, who have works with Italo Calvino since FMR's first appearance in Italy.
** Giovanni Dario comes home
A brilliant Venetian diplomat of the fifteenth century, Giovanni Dario spent many years on arduous missions to Egypt, Persia, and the Ottoman court, representing Venice's commercial interests in the Levant and succesfully negotiating with the sultan. His efforts were richly rewarded by the Republic, and he built for himself an extraordinary palazzo on the Grand Canal. A quirky mixture of sumptuous marbles and gothic design, Ca' Dario recreates, in Venetian terms, the enchantments of the East.
** A flawed master
The Royal Academy of Arts, London, celebrates the work of Alfred Gilbert, the nineteenth-century sculptor, bronze caster, and goldsmith whose masterpiece, Eros, at Piccadilly Circus, is one of London's most famous landmarks.
** Exhibitions
- Vienne 1880-1938. "La joyeuse Apocalypse"
- Winslow Homer Watercolors
- Treasures of the Jewish Museum
- Cecil Beaton. Fashion and portrait photographer (1904-1880) show less

Initial US printing. Spectacular photos and drawings from around the world.
A thing of beauty to hold in your hands!

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