Mario Testino - A Beautiful World

"From the very beginning of this project I felt I should call it A Beautiful Worldbecause I was discovering new kinds of beauty in places I had never looked before...” Mario Testino

Palazzo Bonaparte hosts A Beautiful World, the new project, a world premiere, by Mario Testino, one of the most famous contemporary fashion photographers.

Born in Peru in 1954, but of Irish and Italian origins, he moved to London in 1976 and became one of the most prominent and innovative fashion and portrait photographers of his generation.

His shots were published in the industry's leading publications: legendary images, as legendary are the people he has portrayed, from Kate Moss to Madonna, Naomi Campbell to Lady D, to name but a few.

Of him, Terence Pepper, curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery in London, said he is the "John Singer Sargent of our times", while the gallery's director, Charles Saumarez Smith, referring to the record-breaking Mario Testino PORTRAITS retrospective of 2002, likened him to the prestigious tradition of court portraitists, from Holbein to Reynolds, Goya to Rubens.

Over the past seven years, however, Testino has set off in search of new subjects beyond the boundaries of the fashion world and towards a new creative path, to find inspiration in the cultural identities of the countries in which he had begun to set his fashion shoots as early as 2007.

A Beautiful World offered him, therefore, the opportunity to bring to life images of an incredible vitality, made of traditional clothes and costumes, but at the same time innovative and worn with pride, to preserve and hand down their origins.

Since 2017, Testino has travelled through more than 30 countries, taking more than 70 large-format photographs presented together in the exhibition for the first time.

“In my travels, I realised that when a country loses the bond between its history and its traditional dress something truly precious is lost.” Mario Testino

Programme may be subject to change

Cover: Mario Testino Photograph by Philippe Kliot © Mario Testino