Giulio Romano. La forza delle cose (Palazzo Te, Mantova, 8 October 2022–8 January 2023). Catalogue by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini. Venice: Marsilio Arte, 2022, 207 pp., colour illustrations. ISBN: 979‐12‐5463‐049‐5.

Abstract

In his preface to the exhibition catalogue, commenting on the fragmentary state of Palazzo Te after spoliations that occurred over the centuries, the director of the complex, Stefano Baia Curioni, evokes the nostalgia of a lost splendour produced by the overwhelming frescoes and stucco reliefs of the ceilings. Compared to those decorations, he concludes, ‘everything else is an absence’. This is precisely the challenge with which Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, the two curators of the show Giulio Romano. La forza delle cose, had to engage: exhibiting an absence. Even if they focused on the production of ‘Raphael’s most important pupil’ as a designer of luxury objects – mostly tableware – and stunning pieces of furniture, such disappearance is not just that of his creations from the rooms of the suburban residence conceived for Federico II. In other words, this exhibition did not simply aim to suggest the former opulence of the interiors of the Gonzaga court and, in so doing, demonstrate how their riches were a substantial part of the aesthetic experience of courtly life in the Renaissance: as the title suggested, to reveal the social and performative power (‘forza’) of those things (‘cose’). The curators had to take a step further as the absence they challenged was also of the very artefacts produced after Giulio’s designs. They all underwent destruction and reuse as was commonplace for early modern highend tableware, which could be promptly sacrificed for financial reasons whenever new gold and silver currency needed to be coined. If, on one hand, this was among the reasons for the continuous request of new inventions that triggered Giulio’s creativity, these precious, smallscale objects were ‘intrinsically transient’ and in most cases disappeared over the decades. How did the concise, erudite and precious exhibition conceived by Furlotti and Rebecchini respond to that brief? Be it documentary, objectbased or reconstructive, different strategies were put in place in the six rooms of Palazzo Te hosting the show, not least to respond to different types of audiences. The exhibition centred on drawing, both conceptually and physically, and thereby adopted one of the most consolidated paradigms for the interpretation of the period, whose origins in sixteenthcentury artistic theory and enduring central role for