For the past year, the famed ruins of Pompeii, near Naples, have had an unusual accompaniment—a large exhibition of works by the late French-Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj. For us, on our first visit to Pompeii, it was an amazing addition to the experience.
Clearly, however, not everyone feels that way; both our guide and a number of our fellow-visitors clearly would have preferred to return in June when the exhibit will have finished its one-year residency.
Mitoraj, who died in 2014, had often spoken of a desire to exhibit in Pompeii. After his death, his assistant and others worked to get permission for the exhibition and to raise the funds needed to make it happen.
For me, Mitoraj's works, while literally monumental in scale, brought the ruined city into human scale. It's possible to look down long streets of walls and pillars and stone, and have no sense of human habitation. Even the casts of bodies of the victims of the two-millenia-ago explosion of Mount Vesuvius don't help.
But Mitoraj's works, with their classical vocabulary and their references to Roman and Greek mythology, provide not only a bronze contrast to the tan stones of the city, but also a complement: their ruined perfection mirrors the city's own destruction.
At the opening of the exhibition, the Italian Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, called it “a bridge between our epoch, torn to pieces and grieved, and the Classic Age.” In Mitoraj's own words: “my art is an example of this dichotomy: mesmerizing perfection attached to corrupted imperfection.”
Before Pompeii, we saw a similar placement of a Mitoraj work (above), placed among the Greek temples in the Valle dei Templi at Agrigento, in Sicily. That haunting image was already in my mind when we arrived at Pompeii, and were greeted before the entrance by the double sculpture called 'Hermanos,' or 'Brothers.'
As we walked through different areas of the site, it seemed as if there were more more Mitoraj works than there actually are; you encounter them over and over, from different angles, against different backgrounds.
Although Mitoraj is usually described as French-Polish, he was born in Germany during World War II, where his mother had been deported to a labor camp and his father was a French prisoner of war. After training in Poland, he worked in France and Italy, before returning to Poland. For more on his life and career, click HERE.
For an interesting discussion of the exhibit, its history and meaning, click HERE.
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