Silvio Porzionato pays homage to the masterpieces of the great masters of classical art that have guided his career as an artist.
A symbol of virtue and resistance, Lucretia’s story has inspired the most important artists in the history of art, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Titian, Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Botticelli and Raphael, who have reproduced numerous interpretations of it.
Lucrezia was a Roman noblewoman of distinguished principles, known for her loyalty and purity, who had been abused by the son of Tarquinio the Superb, Sextus Tarquinio. Following the abuse, the woman sought revenge and took her own life by stabbing herself in the heart. This act provoked a popular uprising that drove the Tarquins out of Rome and gave rise to the Republic. The original sculpture that inspired this painting by Silvio Porzionato is in the Vatican Museums in Rome and is actually a marble bust from the Roman era of an unnamed woman. Porzionato reads in this face a universal, timeless story and transposes his personal vision of Lucretia onto canvas.
Deep into blue – the BLUESERIES
In his brand new series, entitled ‘BLUESERIES’, for the first time Silvio Porzionato pays homage to the icons and classical subjects that have shaped and inspired his career as an artist.
The inspiration was born between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Vatican Museums: initially attracted by busts and statues of minor characters, the artist continues the pictorial cycle focusing on a figurative and conceptual interpretation of the most important paintings of all time.
‘BLUESERIES’ is an ode to the beauty and complexity of art, both ancient and contemporary, to the power of imagination and the ability of art to inspire and transform. The artist skilfully interweaves personal elements of contemporary figuration with abstractionism and, conceptually, even cubism. First and foremost, he makes a profound reflection on the continuity of art through the centuries and the incessant search for new forms of expression.
The common thread of this series is blue, specifically cyan, charged and intense. Blue has always had multiple meanings: it is depth, it is infinite, it is an interior colour, which tells of the soul. For Vassili Kandinsky, blue represented man’s impulse to search for his inner nature.
