Pier Paolo Pasolini - Everything is Sacred. The seer body

The National Galleries of Ancient Art in Palazzo Barberini, Palazzo delle Esposizioni and MAXXI - the National Museum of 21st Century Arts present a prestigious exhibition project dedicated to the great intellectual of the 20th century on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.

The three museums host three different exhibitions united by the common thread of the production and cultural influence that Pasolini has had and continues to have on society and contemporary art.

Everything is Sacred, a title inspired by the sentence pronounced by the wise Chiron in the film Medea (1969), is inspired by what Pier Paolo Pasolini considers sacred: the world of the underclass, archaic and religious, without classes and ideological affiliations, as opposed to the modern world, rational, secular and bourgeois.

The exhibition at Palazzo Barberini, curated by Michele Di Monte, is divided into six sections dedicated to body figures. In a sort of visual "editing", the path deepens the decisive role of the artistic tradition in cinema and visual imagination of Pasolini: Prologue. The virtual body of the images; Figure I. The epiphanic body; Figure II. The body of the scandal; Figure III. The Body of Condolence; Figure IV. The popular body; Epilogue, The subject body.

On display are about 140 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, and books, which show the expressive power and vital force of images: from the Primitives to the Baroque, from the hieratic archaism of Giotto's painters to Caravaggio's innovative vision, and the theme of the sacred, the leitmotif of the exhibition.

For the entire project, on the schedule is a rich program of coordinated events and performances between the three exhibition venues with the involvement of the foreign Academies in Rome, the Archivio Luce/Cinecittà and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, NABA and other universities, organizations and institutions.

Image: Set photo from La ricotta, 1963, photo Paul Ronald, Collection Maraldi