[exhibition] Le corps et l'âme: De Donatello à Michel-Ange. Sculptures Italiennes de la Renaissance, edited by Marc Bormand, Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Francesca Tasso. Paris (Musée du Louvre) and Milan (Castello Sforzesco). Renaissance Studies 36 (2022): 651–61 (original) (raw)

Giulio Dalvit E xhibition reviews are a tricky business. Different exhibitions call for different kinds of reviews, not least because of their peculiar role as bridges between the exhibition as recorded in a catalogue and the exhibition as experienced in a space. What do we expect an exhibition review to do? Do we want it to be a guide to (or through) the show? A summary of the catalogue's verbal arguments vis à vis the show's visual ones? Is a review meant to allude to what the exhibition could have been, and was not? Or should it, perhaps more fairly, judge if an exhibition failed or succeeded in relation to its scope as it was determined and presented by the organisers (and in relation to the circumstances in which they found themselves working)? The exhibition under review exposes the complexities of reviewing as a practice. An ambitious survey of Italian sculpture of the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it comprised just under 150 works, mostly sculptures, which spanned many, if not all, media. Its geographical purview extended beyond Florence to include works from other areas, mainly the Veneto, Siena and Milan. Generally, sculpture exhibitions are much more costly than those dedicated to painting, and less popular: routinely opposed by museum management, they are few and far between. Additionally, loans are more difficult to secure for thematic exhibitions than they are for those devoted to a named artist, and they have become especially difficult at the moment given the pandemic. Despite the extremely challenging times at which this exhibition took place, important works were still summoned to Paris and Milan from places as far away as New York City (no. 127) or as remote as Oppido Mamertina, in the Aspromonte region in Calabria (no. 97). On top of this, the organisers also promoted two conferences to complement the show (Paris, 29 April 2021; Milan, 30 September 2021), whose proceedings one hopes will be published soon. Overall, there is ample reason to genuinely congratulate them.