INTERVIEWS

How many years, how many centuries, does it take to recognize the shape of time? Only Krònos makes intelligible the plurality of sets of objects that have been composed and re-assembled, as in a kaleidoscope of colored glass fragments, in palaces, galleries, studios, attics, drawing a crazy geometry inscribed in illogical and absurd lines. This swarm of artifacts, which were part of the same hive and which have crossed oceans and mountains to urbanize in places with no historical sense, need time to glimpse the secret order of the original collection. Taken one by one, following their estrangement caused by different destinies, and reassembled after centuries of oblivion, they unfold a map that is not always clear, with hidden and indecipherable sinuosities, which suggests rustling and whispers, amazing and noisy parties, tinkling of jewels and crystals, horrid visions of petrified monsters, abysses of enigmas and art thunderbolt syndromes. All together, today, they bring to our knowledge the inventory of an unexplored and dark world, but precisely for this reason indispensable. The dispersion always leaves a flaming tail behind it: enchanted by so much glow, we set out to follow its trail backwards, until we reached there, where the disaster had occurred, and, before that, in the place where everything had been desired, collected, placed. The Gonzaga collections mean all this, and even more: they represented a scientific and design challenge for all of us who have worked on them, but above all they are the platform from which collections that are today settled in our knowledge have started or developed. in turn, by relating with us who studied the stock, they found new logics in their becoming. Hence, understanding the mechanisms of acquisition and the consistency of the heritage in their entirety has helped to reconstruct a history of collecting in Europe that has seen us side by side, in taking up the threads that intertwine, and at times tangle in such a stubborn way, by many friendly researchers who apparently deal with different sets from ours, but who have found common reasons for analysis and knowledge in our studies.

The research path we have undertaken, and the exhibition that is presented here, have been designed for accumulation, and then for pauses, so as not to overwhelm those who are preparing for the first time to face the collections of the Gonzagas of Mantua in their entirety, a mythical universe and untouchable from which endless stories have departed. Each one thus traced only one of the possible paths, but he probed all the declinations, organizing different and unusual grammars made even with deviant punctuation.

The final result synthesizes the culture of the court through the Museum that was established here and the whole world of appearances and volatile senses that had self-reproduced and multiplied infinitely within them, creating a game of distorting mirrors that sometimes amplify and others reduce this or that detail, as in Andreini's comedy of Amor in the mirror. Let the curtain rise, therefore, on everything that the Gonzaga collections reveal about themselves, certainly positivist, and above all hidden. (...)