The “The Art of Leonardo – Opera Omnia” exhibition, co-organised by the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) and the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, closed with great public acclaim. In only one month, the exhibition recorded almost 100,000 visitors, especially students and young people yearning to get to better know Leonardo Da Vinci and his story.
After touring the exhibition together with the Director of the CAFA Art Museum and the Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, the Italian Ambassador in Beijing, Ettore Sequi, commented: “The figure of Leonardo is particularly topical and exceptionally modern. He is an extraordinary testimony of the combination of art and innovation: he was simultaneously a great artist and an exceptional innovator for his time and has inspired the activity of many scholars after him. This year we celebrate the 500th anniversary of his death with an agenda full of initiatives throughout China to further explore the figure of Leonardo and, through him, of the Italian genius.” The exhibition is part of the agenda of lectures, meetings and art and cultural events that the Italian Embassy, the IIC and the consular network in China have programmed through the year to celebrate this important anniversary.
Numerous side-events, again co-organised with the IIC, were set up to accompany the exhibition at the CAFA Museum. Among them, the greatest interest was raised by the cycle of ‘guided tours in live streaming” that – according the statistical data provided by the CAFAM – reached out to more than one million spectators.
The exhibition was curated by art historian Prof. Antonio Paolucci and produced by RAICom as part of an international art and education promotion programme sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and, after Beijing, will move to Canton and then to other important Asian cities. The “Art of Leonardo – Opera Omnia” exhibition displayed reproductions – printed on canvas in life-size scale and very high definition – of all of Leonardo’s 17 masterpieces that are kept in 11 of the world’s most important museums. The exhibition would have been impossible without the effort and technique of RAICom, which offers scholars, students and all lovers of Renaissance artists the opportunity to admire Leonardo’s brilliant pictorial work from close-up and in a single venue.
