The Director of the Italian Cultural Institute

Silvio Marchetti

is pleased to invite you to the presentation of

VOLUPTAS DOLENDI: I gesti del Caravaggio

Music and gesture in Caravaggio's paintings (55 min)

A film by Francesco Vitali

Adaptation of Mara Galassi and Deda Cristina Colonna’s

theatrical performance

With a presentation by the director Francesco Vitali

Presented by Professor Robert L. Kendrick, University of Chicago Music Department

and the Director of the film Francesco Vitali

Tuesday May 15^th, 2012

6pm

Caravaggio is perhaps the first ‘modern’ painter to insert theatrical gestures in his works, that can be defined as multimedia spectacle (Dinko Fabris, Oxford Journals).

His major contribution to the new Baroque aesthetics does not concern only his use of light, but also, as acknowledged by his contemporaries, the high degree of the naturalistic reproduction in his paintings. Assembling light and naturalist reproduction, Caravaggio used gesture to give movement to the characters. What we also gain from this painter's masterpieces is a fourth dimension: the sound that was in the background of his painted scenes.

In 2002 the totality of Caravaggio's gestures, generating multimedia non-verbal suggestions (through light, costumes, body movements and dance, music), has been the center of an extraordinary performance, set in the medieval Basilica di San Marco in Milan: a church reworked in the Baroque, and visited by the child Mozart.

The protagonists of this show were the actress and dancer Deda Cristina Colonna, and the double-harp player Mara Galassi. Their work is an original synthesis of different arts: music, dance, acting, painting. They trace Caravaggio’s visionary art, by giving moving life to his paintings, evoking and quoting their suggestions rather than recreating their images. This aim is reached by the use of real candles and steadycam, both ideas of the director Francesco Vitali, who is also director of photography.

The film was produced by the “Marco Fodella Foundation for Early Music in Milan” (www.fondazionemarcofodella.it).

Robert L. Kendrick, Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, received his Ph.D. (musicology) and M.A. (ethnomusicology) from New York University, after a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. A member of Milan’s Accademia Ambrosiana, Kendrick is also a former Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has advised or worked with a range of early music performers, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia, and Boston’s La Donna Musicale.. Among his books are “The Sound of Milan”, 1580-1650 (2002) and “Celestial Sirens” (1996). He has also edited the motets of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani for A-R Editions (1998).

The presentation will be followed by a reception.