Curated by Marco Pierini and Michele Emmer

The exhibition offers an excursus on the birth of the artistic, scientific, cultural interest of bubbles and foils of soapy water. Symbol of fragility , of the transience of human ambitions, of life itself, since the sixteenth century, soap bubbles have fascinated generations of artists for those plays of color that move on soapy surfaces, for their brightness, for their lightness.
The National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia tackles this theme traditionally related to the artistic genre of still life and vanitas for the first time in a dedicated exhibition. The exhibition, entitled Bubbles of soap. Forme dell'utopia between Vanitas, art and science, curated by Marco Pierini, director of the National Gallery of Umbria and Michele Emmer, former professor of Mathematics at the Sapienza University of Rome, presents itself as an interdisciplinary initiative which, parallel to the historical and artistic path, tells the birth of the scientific, physical and mathematical interest of soapy sheets, models of a very stable geometry of forms.
The itinerary consists of about 60 works that cover a long period of time ranging from the sixteenth century to the contemporary, by authors such as Guido Reni, Fra Galgario, Jan Bruegel the Younger, Gerrit Dou, Karel Dujardin , loaned by the most important national institutions and international, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and opens with some allegorical works related to the theme of Vanitas .
The first section also tells of the birth of this iconography, underlining the influence that the works of Hendrick Goltzius had on Dutch art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The review continues by offering an exhaustive overview of the theme that reaches up to the twentieth century with works by artists such as Man Ray, Max Beckmann, Giulio Paolini, up to its discussion in the field of contemporary architecture, with the maquette of the Water Cube , the Olympic swimming pool in Beijing designed by the Australian firm PTW Architects, with which China State Construction Engineering Corp and Arup Ltd. collaborated
The exhibition also features a section dedicated to prints and engravings, photographs, as well as posters and advertising posters. Important in this sense are the posters from the Salce di Treviso Collection, which illustrate the great fortune of this subject for advertising purposes for the sale of products linked above all to personal care, starting with the famous example of the Pears soap poster, reworked in starting with the painting Soap Bubbles, by the British painter and illustrator John Everett Millais (1829-1896).
Parallel to the artistic path, the exhibition documents the fundamental role played by soap bubbles in the eighteenth-century research on the refraction of light and colors , up to the subsequent ones concerning the theories on minimal surfaces or on the forms of organic aggregation of matter.
Starting from Isaac Newton 's book, Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colors of Light , of 1706, from the Oliveriana Library of Pesaro, in which the English physicist describes in detail the phenomena observed on the surface of soapy foils, to arrive at current experiments through the aid of computer graphics, the review highlights the importance that bubbles have played in all contemporary science, and how these latest discoveries, in turn, continue to inspire artists and architects contemporaries in their creations.