Escher

Palazzo Bonaparte hosts the largest Escher exhibition ever held, an anthological of around 300 works which includes the famous Hand with a Reflecting Sphere (1935), Bond of Union (1956), Metamorphosis II (1939), Day and Night (1938), the famous Emblemata series and many others, just to mention those best known to the general public. There are also numerous unpublished works never exhibited before.

The exhibition pays homage to the great Dutch genius on the centenary of his first visit to Rome in 1923; Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972) in fact, after various trips to Italy that began in 1921 when he visited Tuscany, Umbria and Liguria, he arrived in Rome where he lived for twelve years, from 1923 to 1935, at number 122 of via Poerio, in the Monteverde Vecchio district.

An artist discovered relatively recently, Escher has been able to conquer millions of visitors around the world thanks to his ability to speak to a very large audience. With his engravings and lithographs, he has been able to transport us to an imaginary and impossible world, where art, mathematics, science, physics and design mix. A great variety of themes converge in his works, and for this reason he represents an unicum in the panorama of the history of art.

The Roman period had a strong influence on all his subsequent work which saw him prolific in the production of lithographs and engravings especially of landscapes, glimpses, architectures and views of ancient and Baroque Rome which he represented in its nocturnal aspect, in the dim light of a lantern. The nights spent drawing, sitting in a folding chair and with a small flashlight hanging from his jacket, are counted by Escher among the best memories of that period. As evidence of those years, the complete series of the twelve Roman nocturnes produced in 1934 is also on display.

The exhibition, under the patronage of the Municipality of Rome - Department of Culture and the Embassy and Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, is produced and organized by Arthemisia in collaboration with the M. C. Escher Foundation and Maurits and is curated by Federico Giudiceandrea - one of the the world's leading Escher experts – and Mark Veldhuysen, CEO of the M.C. Escher Company.

Photo: Maurits Cornelis Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935. Lithograph, 31.8x21.3 cm. Maurits Collection, Bolzano