​Stockholm: floods in colour to celebrate Leonardo ​

The façade of the building that hosts the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm is transformed into a colour-hued music score. The ‘Tutto.Leonardo’ multimedia installation by Italian artist Mariangela Levita, co-developed by the Italian Embassy in Stockholm as part of the “Italian Way of Life” integrated promotion programme to celebrate the genius of Leonardo da Vinci at 500 years from his death. However, the work by Mariangela Levita also arises from the recognition of the versatile mastery of Gio Ponti, who designed and built the building of the Institute 61 years ago on the basis of an intuition of Carlo Maurilio Lerici, engineer and archaeologist, who shouldered much of the financial burden. The ‘Tutto.Leonardo’ project merges painting and architecture, light and colour, sign and sound, transforming the more than 100 differently configured windows on the façade of the Stockholm building into “diaphragm-screens”, based on the theory of the simple colours that Leonardo found in nature: “il bianco metteremo per la luce senza la quale nissun colore veder si può, ed il giallo per la terra, il verde per l’acqua, l’azzurro per l’aria, ed il rosso per il fuoco, ed il nero per le tenebre” (“We will put white for light, without which no colour can be seen, and yellow for the ground, green for water, blue for air, red for fire and black for darkness”). Thus, every single window serves as a monochrome filter for the surrounding space, mirroring the building’s daily life in an osmotic relationship between the inside and outside of the building. Starting from Leonardo’s idea that painting was a mental exercise, TUTTO.Leonardo embraces Gio Ponti’s all-inclusive concept of art, to the point of materially applying his thought that everything in the world must be brightly coloured.