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It's like to be at the same time at Lilliput and
Brobdingnag. Around us the baroque  magnificence of the hunting
house of the Stupinigi, by now in phase of gradual restore thanks to
a careful intervention of restore financed by Fiat and the CRT Foundation
according to the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus and the local
Monuments and Fine Arts Offices.
And
in the triumphant scenario of this graceful residence, that could not
condense better the theatrical and scenographical taste of the baroque
spatiality, the cream of the seventeen-eighteen century architecture,
the masterworks of Bernini and of  Borromini, of Guarini and
of Mansart, of Vanvitelli and of Juvarra, but reduced and miniaturized
into a series of models strictly by genuine masters.
Conceived
as an historical-artistic sequel of the unforgettable homage of the
“Renaissance, from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo” hold five
years ago at Palazzo Grassi by the same editor of today, Henry A. Millon,
the exposition of Stupinigi in fact resumes the formula of that great
exposition success.
Introducing
a period, a wide space of time of the history of architecture throughout
the models, the most unknown by the wide public, the great architects
of that time arranged to better study their creation and to present
them to their clients.
The
eighty wood models performing the top of the review so become the starting
point of a wide-spectrum survey involving not only the concept of baroque,
and its rapid and widespread diffusion all over Europe, but in a sense
also our current condition, even it pervaded by a homologating rhetoric
of the vogues and transnational languages, even it lightly innervated
by that “triumph of appearance “amplified and extended planetary
scale by the media uproar, even it compelled to face - as in that seventeen
century that in a sense was the rehearsal of modernity-realities never
seen before, bringing progress as well as perils. Yesterday the rising
national states, the  incipient urbanism, the first
stirring of the experimental science.
Nowadays
the supremacy of the enterprises, the new technologies, the global market.
Enucleated from the context and reduced scale assembled within a synthesis
the utmost suggesting, the architecture becomes this way again the litmus
paper of an historical and cultural climate, its most eloquent system
of signs, and the model ends almost to take precedence over the final
project since, the unfailing, arduous outfit of studies, drafts and
draws, brings back to the original intuition of the architects, as if
the thought, in his uncatchable lightness, were already there at all,
captured by the model and the final product being nothing but a cumbersome
and useless mise-en-scène undergoing the events of matter and human
labour.
  And here it is at all, the
great theatre of the baroque architecture: churches and altars, royal
palaces and private houses, municipalities and defensive works, harbours
and lighthouses.
Well
then the persuasive, rhetorical and defensive apparatus of the civil
and religious power but also the places arranged by them for gathering
and amusement, for health, libraries and theatres, monasteries and hospitals,
gardens and fountains.
While
we go around as new Lemuel Gulliver in this kind of Swissminiatur of
the baroque Europe, the Hunting House of Stupinigi shows in a blaze
of lights its found again splendour. It must have been a simply pavilion
for the hunting amusing of Vittorio Amedeo II and his court.
Thanks
to the genius of Filippo Juvarra it becomes one of the jewels of the
European baroque. The powers of the new millennium- the bank, the enterprise-
have turned it into a precious casket of art and culture.
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Mensile di
scienza medica,attualita` e cultura