Antonio Corradini e Luigi Ghirri: Disapparire

A very thin veil binds marble and light, the Baroque gesture and photographic intuition, sculpted matter and the mist that envelops the landscape. It is from this resonance that the exhibition comes to be.

Curated by Elisabetta Dal Carlo, Lara Marchese, Marta Savaris, and Babet Trevisan with Monica De Vincenti, the exhibition begins with a recent discovery: a marble medallion depicting a veiled female face, found in the Foundation’s storage and now recognised as an autograph work by Antonio Corradini. This sculpture—identified as a “Veiled Faith”—is, for the first time, placed in dialogue with the terracotta modello for the “Veiled Faith”, commissioned from Corradini for the Sansevero Chapel in Naples. Alongside the modello and the medallion, the exhibition also presents a marble bust—another “Veiled Faith”—from the collections of Ca’ Rezzonico in Venice.

Antonio Corradini (Venice, 1688 – Naples, 1752), a leading figure of the late Baroque period, made the veil his defining signature. In his sculptures it is not a virtuosic device, but a conceptual threshold between matter and spirit, between physical presence and its dissolution. Responding to this eighteenth-century language, is the gaze of Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano, 1943 – Roncocesi, 1992), represented by a selection of photographs from the Ghirri Archive, on loan to the Foundation since 2015.

The dialogue between Corradini and Ghirri is grounded in this shared tension: giving body to absence, seeking a point at which matter becomes immaterial and the image acquires substance. The exhibition design accompanies and amplifies this investigation.