La Maddalena di Piero di Cosimo: arte, storia e vite di donne nel Rinascimento fiorentino (Piero di Cosimo's Mary Magdalene: Art, History, and the Lives of Women in the Florentine Renaissance)

At VIVE - Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia - in the spaces that once housed the kitchens, restored and reopened for the occasion -  opens the exhibition La Maddalena di Piero di Cosimo: arte, storia e vite di donne nel Rinascimento fiorentino (Piero di Cosimo's Mary Magdalene: Art, History, and the Lives of Women in the Florentine Renaissance), curated by Edith Gabrielli, with historical consultancy by Fernanda Alfieri, Serena Galasso and Isabella Lazzarini.

The exhibition centers on a precious panel by Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), La Maddalena, held in the collection of the Gallerie Nazionali d'Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini and loaned to VIVE as part of a strategic agreement between the two museums. When he painted La Maddalena, toward the end of the 15th century, Piero di Cosimo was establishing himself as one of the most refined and at the same time most mysterious Florentine artists of his generation. Trained in the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, the painter developed a highly personal language, grafting original, at times imaginative, influences from Flemish painting and Leonardo da Vinci onto the solid foundations of his master and Domenico Ghirlandaio.

In the panel, Piero di Cosimo depicts Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' most faithful followers, as a young woman of her time, a fifteenth-century Florentine, intent on reading a book and surrounded by objects from her daily life: her robes, the string of pearls, the jar of ointments, the letter. It is precisely in these objects that the work reveals a world; from here, in fact,
the idea for the exhibition takes shape: to use the painting as a key to entering the lives of women in Renaissance Florence and the reality that surrounded them. This interdisciplinary project involves approximately thirty scholars of diverse backgrounds and backgrounds, in a close dialogue between art history, history, and the history of material culture.

Photo: official poster of the exhibition