The Labirinto della Masone hosts the new exhibition Musca depicta for spring 2024. There is a fly on the painting curated by Sylvia Ferino and Elisa Rizzardi , a large exhibition dedicated to the presence of the fly in art. The small insect, which has always exercised a particular attraction on intellectuals, writers and artists, becomes the eclectic protagonist of the exhibition rooms of the Labyrinth, retracing the many representations - and reflections - of this insect there have been in art, starting from school from Giotto up to the contemporary.

The predilection for the unusual and bizarre that characterized Franco Maria Ricci's publications led him forty years ago to publish one of his most fascinating volumes, entitled Musca depicta. Dedicated to the theme of the fly in painting , with texts by Luciano di Samosata, Leon Battista Alberti, Luigi Pirandello, Giorgio Manganelli and with an illuminating essay by the art historian André Chastel , magnificent illustrations of European painting from the 15th to the 17th century tell some of the artistic incarnations of the buzzing dipteran, always considered annoying, annoying and inappropriate, but whose charm has revealed controversial backgrounds and curiosities over time.

In ancient times, the realistic representation of a fly in the painting could suggest different interpretations, from the Christian warning not to give in to the materiality of the world, up to the idea that the ephemeral insect could embody the artist's fleeting fame, through deception – the trompe l'oeil – which demonstrated the painter's virtuosity. In this regard, the episode has become famous (told first by Filarete and then, naturally, by Vasari) according to which the young Giotto deceived Cimabue by adding in one of the master's paintings a fly so truthful that Cimabue tried several times to chase away , before realizing of the pupil's joke. Having initially gone into a rage, he received proof that his disciple would have a bright future. Even from the second half of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, many painters attempted to reproduce the insect in sacred and profane compositions.

This illusionistic joke, which at the beginning served to affirm one's technical ability (in the naturalistic and anatomical fields, as Leonardo said, artists had always preceded scholars ), over time evolves and downgrades in meaning, among those he considered the fly a mortuary and precarious symbol, a fundamental complement of Vanitates and rich in symbolism, and others an insect like many others, finding themselves having to compete in the still lifes of beautiful flowers and fruits with decidedly more colorful and attractive butterflies, caterpillars and dragonflies .