The history of Europe

Starting the upcoming October 8th in Rome, Palazzo Venezia, the exhibition "The Power and the Grace. The Patron Saints of Europe" will be on display.

The fascinating and complex interplay between the history of Europe and its peoples and two thousand years of history of Christian holiness. The exhibition, sponsored by Enel, comprises one hundred works by artists like van Eyck, Memling, Mantegna, Del Sarto, Van Dyck, Titian, Veronese, El Greco, Guercino, Caravaggio, Murillo, Tiepolo, from the major European museums.

The exhibition, which will last until January 10th, 2010, will give the perception of browsing an ancient history code with thumbnails of exception and travelling, from season to season, through time, culture and social and political history of the Occident.

The exhibition will be inaugurated on October 7th by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary of State, and Hon. Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister.

With medieval boards and large paintings, precious crowns and miniated codes, the masterpieces of art on the one hand depict prosecutions and conversions, baptisms and battles that have bounded the story of the European people to Christianity, and on the other hand they open the royal doors of an ideal iconostasis, the boundary where faith and beauty, visible and invisible, temporal and spiritual all come together.

Promoted by the Italian Government through the Embassy of Italy to the Holy See and by the Pontifical Commission for Cultural Heritage of the Church, the exhibit, curated by Don Alessio Geretti, springs form the collaboration between the Committee of St. Florian - Cultural and Religious Institution of Friuli Venezia Giulia, which offers annual exhibits of religious art of national importance in Illegio, in Carnia - and the Museum Institution of Rome, and is organized by MondoMostre, protagonist of the very successful monographic on Sebastiano del Piombo and of ten large exhibits in the Galleria Borghese.

The exhibition at Palazzo Venezia includes masterpieces of the greatest geniuses of all times: the stigmata of St. Francis of van Eyck, from the Savoy Gallery in Turin, the Martyrdom of St. Peter by Guercino from the Galleria Estense, the St. John the Baptist by Caravaggio from the Corsini Gallery, the St. Louis IX of El Greco from the Louvre, the Emperor Theodosius and St. Ambrose at the Milan Cathedral by van Dyck from the National Gallery of London, the St. George by Mantegna, the St. John the Baptist by Tiziano, both on loan from the Galleries of the Venice Academy, the Victorious St. James by Tiepolo from Budapest, the Immaculate Conception by Murillo from the Prado in Madrid.

A collection of absolute treasures, united by the thread of the plot between power, religion and art.

(October 2009)