Medusa

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova - donazione

Buffa, Giovanni - Zuccaro, Guido

GX1993.396

Unità di misura: cm; Diametro: 56

vetro dipinto

Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna - Torino, Parco del Valentino - 10/05/1902 – 10/11/1902<br>Famiglia Artistica - Milano

"[...] the horrendous image, which the serpents encircle ironically, is held suspended by the hand of Perseus and stands out against the sky in all its petrified terror. Already exhibited at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, it received confirmation of its success in Turin". It was with these words that Alfredo Melani commented in September 1902 on the participation of the leaded glass tondo - made by Guido Zuccaro, on a cartoon by Giovanni Buffa, for the G. Beltrami Vetrate Artistiche in Milan - at the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin.
In discontinuity with the past experiences of historicist matrix, this exhibition, whose official programme foresaw, in the name of a total adhesion to modernity, the strict exclusion of works marked by "simple imitations of styles of the past", represented the first exhibition of international scope organised in Italy after unification. Adhering to a strand of research that was very much in vogue at the time, in which the model of the demonic and mutant woman - in its disturbing physiognomic correspondence with the animal world - had by then taken over from the traditional angelic and idealised female portrait, this painted and leaded glass tondo presented clear expressive and iconographic analogies with the literary and mythological transpositions of international Symbolist culture, from Franz von Stuck to Gustave Moreau.