While exploring the beauty of Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome, we often forget about another hidden gem in Italy: the city of Turin. Turin, a city in Northern Italy that considered the proximity to France has absorbed its influences, has a pulsing industrial heart linked to design and currently to Contemporary Arts. The placid Turin is home to prominent art galleries, museums, international contemporary art fairs like Artissima, art weeks and it enjoys a vibrant emerging art scene. But there is one special place that makes this small town even more appealing to art cravers.
Leaving the city behind and heading towards the Alps, one comes across a fascinating castle converted into a temple of art: the Rivoli Castle. A fortified manor listed in the Unesco World Heritage Sites for its historical interest, today made it even more interesting because it collected national and international Contemporary Art. It is impossible to remain indifferent when you see it from afar.
The charm of this museum can be perceived starting from the building that houses its collection. A castle that does not have a specific architect or period, but on the contrary, it has been built and designed by several hands, remodeled in several eras. The result is an incredibly kaleidoscopic structure, a melting pot of times, styles, and identities.
The origin of the site is rooted in medieval times; the first mention of the castle as a fortress thanks to its strategic and defensible position, dates back to 1159. Afterward, the castle passed from hand to hand to different owners, becoming part of the Savoy dominion in 1247 and remaining so until 1883. Rivoli castle became the seat of the Savoy court with the duke Emanuele Filiberto.
Its rooms have hosted royal events, balls, celebrations, weddings and they have been traversed by nobles, historical and famous people, including curiously Nostradamus, who was called as a spiritual guide for the pregnancy of the duchess Margaret of Valois. Its building has also seen the talent of many architects: from Castellamonte, the father and son architect-couple who transformed the castle from a medieval manor to a luxurious pleasure residence, to Filippo Juvarra, the great baroque architect who in the 17th century made the castle equal to other royal residences, inspired by the glorious example of Versailles, to Carlo Randoni, which in the 19th century absorbed the English influences.
However, the castle has not only had sumptuous times; it was left in disuse during the Napoleonic Wars, and it had to wait a hundred years to be put back in place, with a new and dynamic function as an artistic hub. The structure, in fact, was remodeled only in 1961 by the architect Andrea Bruno, as a celebration for the centenary of Italy’s unification. The project of the visionary architect is a contemporary artwork in itself: the walls of the different eras carry the commemorative dates of the various phases of the building, the materials, the brick facade, and the decorations masterfully combine past and present, the external additions allow visitors to scenically enter and exit the structure. Such a historic and conceptual labyrinth could only become a Contemporary Art museum!
Fig.1 Rivoli Castle, via Wikimedia Commons.
Rivoli Castle officially becomes a leading contemporary museum in 1984, with an opening exhibition that included works from Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Land Art, and Transavanguardia. However, Rivoli is much more than a museum with a quality permanent collection, also enriched thanks to donations of important Italian collectors. As an authentically dynamic institution, it presents inventive temporary exhibitions, theatre performances, concerts, conferences, and interdisciplinary roundtables. It also has a true vocation for didactics and research, with education and curatorial departments and an impressive archive. Research activities and workshops for archivists and curators deal with past and present, trying to reflect on their interrelation.
The Permanent Collection winds its way through the rooms of the modernized Royal Residence dialoguing with its architecture and light, an aspect that in a museum so linked with its space is extremely relevant and to which curators and art lighting insiders pay extreme attention. It includes installations from the mid-1960s that document the most significant Italian tendencies, in particular from Arte Povera, and international currents. Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone, and Maurizio Cattelan artworks blend with internationally renowned artists, from Sol Lewitt to Richard Long. In 2017, the collection also expanded with the acquisition of the treasure of the Italian entrepreneur and eclectic art collector Cerruti, which includes paintings by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky, for an estimated value of $570 million. He also had the largest number of De Chirico paintings in the world, which communicates a lot about the metaphysical and escapist value of his collection and art passion.
Fig.2 Rivoli Castle, via Wikimedia Commons.
Among the most iconic pieces in the permanent collection of Rivoli Castle is Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative Novecento (‘Nine-Hundreds’): a taxidermized horse hanging from the baroque ceiling of the salon. The horse, exhausted, subject to the force of gravity, subdued, loses its meaning of strength and energy. Novecento represents the 20th century, marred by violence and fascisms, and the creation of this work just before the end of the century, represents heaviness but at the same time a message for the future.
There are also stunning installations created ad hoc for the rooms of the castle, such as Panels and Tower with Colours and Scribbles by Sol Lewitt, the first artist to donate a work to the museum in 1991 and realized site-specific for the colors and lights of the room or the immersive Respirare l’ombra (Breathing the shadow) by Giuseppe Penone, a room entirely covered with laurel leaves that with its enveloping scent creates a sensory reflection on humans and nature.
Rivoli Castle is also renowned for its innovative temporary exhibitions: recent contemporary and recognized artists such as Hito Steyerl, Ana Mendieta, Ed Atkins, Susan Hiller have exhibited in solo exhibitions. On the research side, exhibitions dedicated to historical curators and art critics are also extremely interesting, including the exhibition on the obsessions of Harald Szeemann, in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles, and the ongoing and viewable A.B.O. THEATRON. Art or Life, dedicated to one of the prominent Italian curators of the 20th and 21st centuries, Achille Bonito Oliva.
This last one, in particular, made people talk about it also for a curious initiative: the fashion house Gucci designed for the occasion the uniforms of the hall keepers, overcoming the regulation on gender that imposed differences in uniforms, and assimilating them to elegant stage costumes, being the exhibition with a strong theatrical setting. The decision to give attention to figures often neglected in the art world and to collaborate with the fashion industry demonstrates the attitude to openness, interdisciplinarity, and being truly contemporary of this place.
Rivoli is a place that has continued to change form, function, and identity over the centuries. In fact, it is not surprising that, with the Art Helps initiative, Rivoli Castle has also been transformed into a vaccination hub, for Covid19 vaccinations, creating an unconventional but healthy environment for everyone. Rivoli has changed face, to meet the needs of its community and territory. After all, that is what art is for, to cure society, and museums like Rivoli do it every day.
Fig.3 Rivoli Castle, via Wikimedia Commons,
Artworks
Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento: https://artsandculture.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/novecento-maurizio cattelan/NgECh4RXq8exeA?hl=it
Sol Lewitt, Panels and Tower with Colours and Scribbles : https://www.castellodirivoli.org/en/opera/panels-and-tower-with-colours-and-scribbles-pannelli-e-torre-con-colori-e-scarabocchi/
Giuseppe Penone, Respirare l’ombra: