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A towering iteration of Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags that had not too long ago been put in in Naples’s Piazza del Municipio was destroyed by hearth early on the morning of July 12. Arson is suspected. The sculpture, which depicts the titular Roman goddess of affection and fertility solid in plaster and standing earlier than an enormous pile of rags, was publicly unveiled simply two weeks in the past, on June 28. One in all Pistoletto’s most well-known works, it was initially created in 1967; a cement Venus bought from a backyard retailer starred in that iteration. A number of different variations of the sculpture stay on show in museums scattered throughout the globe. Impressed by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 1813–16 Venus with Apple, the set up is supposed to evoke the dichotomy between everlasting magnificence, as embodied by Venus, and the consumerist decline of contemporary society, represented by the heaped rags.
Addressing reporters earlier than the work’s smoldering ruins, Naples mayor Gaetano Manfredi acknowledged that the town’s police had been investigating the conflagration as an act of vandalism and introduced that the set up could be remade. A crowdfunding marketing campaign to pay for the reconstruction is already underway.
“It’s a work that requires regeneration, on the need to discover a steadiness and concord between two minds which can be represented on the one hand by magnificence, and on the opposite by consummate consumerism, a catastrophe,’’ the ninety-year-old Pistoletto advised Italian every day newspaper Corriere della Sera. “The world goes up in flames anyway. The identical spirits which can be waging warfare are those that set the Venus on hearth.”
“Deep dismay at what occurred to the Venus of the Rags,” Manfredi tweeted in Italian. “Now, nonetheless, is the time for a response from the town: I’ve already heard from Pistoletto, the work might be redone. Violence and vandalism won’t cease artwork, regeneration and tradition in Naples.”
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