The National Gallery of the Marche participates in the celebrations for the 700th year of Dante's death. An exhibition focusing on the influence of Dante's imagination on the vision of artists, architects and illustrators is dedicated to the great poet, an emblematic figure of Italian culture, not only literary.
Naturally it was the "Comedy" that gave, through the accurate description of the places crossed by Dante and Virgil, physical and illusory form to the deepest dreams and fears, animating an infinite sequence of imaginary landscapes that, starting from the fourteenth-century frescoes, brings us up to modernity.
Tangible form to those spaces, was given by the rationalist architects Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni, at the end of the Thirties, in the project - never realized of the Danteum. This was the first attempt in which architecture was called upon to give tangible form to Dante's masterpiece, through a truly practicable space. This work, illustrated through the original materials, preserved in the Lingeri Archive in Milan and never exhibited in their entirety, is placed in dialogue with the Ideal City, a masterpiece - also emblematic - of the Italian Renaissance and key work of the Gallery's collections. National team of the Marche. Among them, other works by contemporary Italian architects such as Aimaro Isola, Andrea Branzi and Franco Purini, who have reinterpreted the “section” of the Divine Comedy through a series of original drawings.
In this exhibition, where the Florentine poet's architectural imagery is brought to light for the first time with clarity, the City of God and the City of Men finally seem to be recomposed. From the visual and conceptual comparison between Dante's imaginary and its current interpretation, the broadest reflection on the complex and changing comparison between story and image arises, through the powerful and original visions proposed, which reflect on the fragile nature of the contemporary world reinterpreted through the Dante's eyes.