Tradition and innovation. The art of Mileto Ceramics

The exhibition Tradition and Innovation. The Art of Mileto Ceramics housed in the rooms on the main floor of the Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum, curated by Matilde Amaturo, Anna Aloisa Mileto and Beatrice Savelloni, presents delicate porcelain artefacts showing the long ceramic journey of Agatina Librando Mileto and the business she founded together with her daughters Anna Aloisa and Angela Francesca in 1981.

The works of the Manufacture The Art of Mileto Ceramics, still active, also find a perfect location as they dialogue with the historic ceramic collections of Princess Alice Blanceflor de Bildt bequeathed to the Italian State and present in the Museum, as well as with the contemporary ceramic productions resulting from donations and museum acquisitions.

This exhibition, therefore, also for this reason, is part of a path of valorization both of the collections of the House Museum, and of the ceramic production of central Italy, offering a very interesting panorama of a significant part of the production of Italian decorative art of the twentieth century. Through the exhibition of works that range from the beginnings of the decorator Agatina Librando Mileto, in the 1940s in Denmark, to current production, it is possible for the public to learn about a story of manufacturing enterprise and of female success, moving with the mind to distant times and places.

The decorations of the pieces, in fact, are inspired on the one hand by the masters of the Renaissance and the great European manufactures of the eighteenth century, on the other, by the Far East, Persia, India and the more distant China and Japan. Starting from these suggestions, the decorator Agatina Librando Mileto, with great skill, reworking all these different traditions, reconstructs a sort of encyclopedia of ceramics in a personal and innovative way. In this way, all the complex artisan work that lies behind the ceramic artefacts emerges together with the continuity of a passion for ceramic art by the Mileto family.

Photo credits: official poster of the exhibition