THE GARDEN OF THE MUSE SILENT

THE GARDEN OF THE MUSE SILENT THE INSTALLATION OF GIANFRANCO MEGGIATO

IN PIETRASANTA IN FRONT OF THE BELL ATTRIBUTED TO BUONARROTI

PIAZZETTA SAN MARTIMO | 1 JULY <1 SEPTEMBER 2019

“Not soldiers stationed behind sandbags, but sculptures: The Silent Muses. After having inspired poetry, the Muses defend it, a last bastion against barbarism and death”

(Luca Beatrice)

Pietrasanta, used to hosting the greatest international sculptors, opens its doors to an installation of the cycle “Le Muse Silenti” by master Gianfranco Meggiato, proposed in a new composition, designed specifically for Pietrasanta, capital of sculpture.

An event patronize by the Municipality of Pietrasanta and organized by the Galleria Paoli which until September 1 will offer a different view of Piazzetta San Martino and the Campanile del Duomo attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti.

The artist’s contemporary sculptures interact with the past: with the sixteenth-century architecture of the city and with the splendid brick bell tower built between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries and the entire helical-shaped staircase, unique of its kind.

In the square, Meggiato’s sculptures “live” inside a path delimited by jute sacks filled with sand that serve as a screen not for weapons or bombs as happens in real trenches, but in the superstructures and in-consciousness of man, understood as a lack of awareness and freedom of thought. Inside the bell tower, other works by the artist dot the spiral staircase, transporting the viewer into a unique dimension, out of time.

Exhibited for the first time at the MARCA Open sculpture museum in Catanzaro and Pistoia – the capital of Italian culture in 2017, the cycle of “Le Muse Silenti” won Gianfranco Meggiato the prestigious ICOMOS-UNESCO award “for having masterfully conjugated the ancient and contemporary in sculptural installations of great evocative power and aesthetic value “.

There are nine sculptures that make up the Pietrasanta 2019 installation: four monumental ones in the small square and five smaller ones inside the bell tower.

In the small square we start from the 1.2 meters in diameter of the Quantum Sphere, to the 2 meters of the Tension Disc at 3 meters high of Taurus all works made of cast aluminum (chiseled and painted in black to remember the lava stone) to the sculpture in fiberglass with a diameter of 2 meters. Sphere Sirio, painted in white.

Inside the Michelangelo’s bell tower there are five sculptures: Il Mio Pensiero Libero, placed at the entrance, almost 2 meters high which with its shapes tends to rotate harmonizing with the spiral staircase and four other vertical (bronze, about a meter high) placed on the stairs, Oltre and Il Soffio della Vita, painted in white, Anima Latina in red and Ode to Spring, in the shade of purple.