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Villa Bardini, on the heights of Florence, offers an ideal setting for this exhibition dedicated to the legendary figure of Pinocchio.
Gepetto created a world famous character that makes adults and children dream, this crazy puppet. The fantastic puppet, after perilous adventures, turns into a real little boy, thus fulfilling his father’s dearest wish.Carlo Collodi wrote this philosophical fable, an extravagant tale and a picaresque novel, in 1881.
«The adventures of Pinocchio» are a true chronicle of the peasantry in Florence of the nineteenth century.
Composed in Tuscan dialect and translated into 260 languages, this novel was taken up by Walt Disney in 1940 in a cartoon where the character of Pinocchio evolved in the framework of the Tyrolean Alps. Thanks to his conscience embodied by Jiminy Cricket, the little cricket, his faithful companion dubbed by the good fairy who monitors step by step the progress of the wooden puppet, he will become a being of flesh and blood.
The Italian television series of Luigi Comencini, in 1972, remains very faithful to the original version, showing a Geppetto trying to escape poverty. He creates his magic puppet and the good fairy embodied by the beautiful Gina Lollobrigida teaches him the basics of savoir vivre.
This Florentine exhibition brings together some fifty works of contemporary art, from Giacometti to LaChapelle, from Paul McCarthy to Jim Dine to Alexander Calder.
David LaChapelle
David Bowie : face masks, 1995 © David LaChapelle,1995