Mostra Chagall Mantova | Palazzo della Ragione

The Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua, built in 1251, is the building that overlooks Piazza delle Erbe. After years of painstaking refurbishment following the earthquake of 2012, it will finally open its doors to the city on the occasion of the Marc Chagall exhibition.

Marc Chagall is a sublime narrator. In his works he speaks to us about the stories, large and small, of a people that knows how to become lost and then found again over the course of time.

The exhibition in Mantua is hosted in a Palazzo that has been repurposed, a building where for centuries the citizens were administered justice, and in which people of all social classes and of various cultural levels exhibited their problems and their lives. On the walls, large medieval frescoes still tell the story of the adventures of a community, almost suspended in the void. The visitor can thus admire, in a wholly unprecedented situation, the similarities and the differences between the artistic output of a twentieth-century master, and the outcomes filled with color of many unknown painters from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. All the while knowing that humanity is the protagonist.

The main walls of the Palazzo's large rectangular hall, which was reopened after painstaking restoration, are barren, and the beams used for the roof are completely modern. The many layers of priceless frescoes that have survived cover the entrance wall (south-western wall) and the rear wall (north-eastern wall), i.e. the one closest to the complex of the Palazzo del Podestà. Nonetheless, traces of frescoes remain on the left wall in relation to the entrance, and the same is true for several corners in the room. This tells us that the at one time everything was covered by a painted surface.

Mostra Marc Chagall.
Palazzo della Ragione, Piazza Erbe - 46100 Mantova.
Dal 05/09/2018 al 03/02/2019.
www.chagallmantova.it