Joanna De Vos

The exhibition, entitled Jan Fabre. Spiritual Guards, promoted by the Comune di Firenze, pans out between the Forte di Belvedere, Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria. In fact, it is one of the most complex and multifaceted exhibitions that this Flemish artist and author has ever produced in any public space in Italy. For the very first time, a living artist is expounding his art in three venues of outstanding historical and artistic importance at once. Roughly one hundred of Fabre’s works dating from 1978 to 2016 are on display, including bronze and wax sculptures, performance films and works made of wing cases of the jewel scarab. Fabre will also be presenting two new works specifically devised and produced for this occasion. The premiere was an event of outstanding visual impact with strong symbolic connotations: on the morning of 15 April, two of Fabre’s bronze sculptures – temporarily – joined the open-air museum that is Piazza Signoria. One of them, an exceptionally large work entitled Searching for Utopia (2003), interacts with the equestrian monument to Grand Duke Cosimo I, a Renaissance masterpiece by Giambologna, while the second, called The man who measures the clouds (American version, 18 years older) (1998-2016), stands lively on the Arengario outside Palazzo Vecchio between the copies of Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith. In both works observers are able to identify the artist’s own features in his dual capacity as knight and guardian, as a mediator between heaven and earth, between natural and spiritual forces. Amidst art that placed itself in the service of political and financial power – the art of Piazza della Signoria with its marble giants (the David, Hercules and Neptune) and its biblical, mythological and local figures (Judith, Perseus and the Marzocco Lion of Florence) – Jan Fabre pits an art seeking to depict and to embody the power of the imagination, the mission of the artist as “spiritual guard”. And he does this in a square designed and used since the Renaissance as a figurative agora` and stage setting, a square which has become an iconic paradigm of the relationship between art and the public space, and in which the symbolic and spectacular function of the modern monument has been configured in exemplary language. As of April 15, Palazzo Vecchio hosts a series of sculptures interacting with the frescoes and artefacts housed in some of the rooms open to the public, particularly the Quartiere di Eleonora, the Sala dell’Udienza and the Sala dei Gigli. The works on display include a huge globe 2.5 metres in diameter, totally covered by the iridescent scarabs, its shape and size inspired precisely by the celebrated globe in the Sala delle Mappe geografiche, made by Ignazio Danti in the 16th century.