On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism on April 25, 1945, the National Museum of Abruzzo in L’Aquila is offering an afternoon of reflection to raise awareness and remember the moments that marked, after years of pain and destruction, the end of the war and Fascism, as well as to foster shared memory.
On April 24th at 4:30 pm, MuNDA will present a work of art that evokes Italian history: the mixed-media painting on wood “Homage to the Nine Martyrs of L’Aquila/Let’s Fight for Peace” by Remo Brindisi, signed on the front and dated 1954. It is a large, double-sided, multi-material work measuring 244 x 364 cm, weighing approximately 150 kg.
The front, painted in oil on plywood, is dedicated to the nine young men from L’Aquila who, in September 1943, were captured by the German contingent in the mountains near Collebrincioni and shot in L’Aquila’s Campomizzi Barracks. The back consists of a series of 16 PCI posters, joined together and glued together to form a painting support. On the back, the artist chose to depict a yellow sun and a dove holding an olive branch atop a tank. On the left side, running vertically from bottom to top, the phrase “Let’s fight for peace” is handwritten. In the lower left corner, a handwritten date “1962” is signed in brush, which appears to be an enlargement of a poster created by Pablo Picasso in the same year.
MuNDA Director Federica Zalabra will be present at the meeting.
The meeting will be introduced by Professor Walter Cavalieri and art critic Antonio Gasbarrini.
Historian Cavalieri will illustrate key passages from his book “Trial for the Nine Martyrs” (2023), which reveals the true unfolding of the initial episode of the L’Aquila Resistance through the study of judicial documents kept secret by law for 70 years after the criminal trial concluded in 1952. What emerges is an original reconstruction of an episode about which the city’s memory, lacking reliable data on its unfolding, has for decades oscillated between the opposing extremes of glorification and derision.
Art critic Gasbarrini will explain the reasons that, in late 1994, led to the title of the monumental painting from Brindisi “Homage to the Nine Martyrs of L’Aquila” (formerly “Let’s Fight for Peace”). He will contextualize its depiction within the artistic ferment taking place in Italy in the first half of the 1950s. It will also connect the painting’s neorealist poetics with the subsequent visionary cycle “History of Fascism”—created by Remo Brindisi between 1958 and 1961—thus opening more than one door to the nascent New Figuration, or Critical Figuration, as you might call it.
Restorers Giovanna Antonelli, Barbara Costantini, Marta Silvia Filippini, and Matilde Migliorini have formed a temporary consortium (RTI) to jointly and equally undertake the restoration of a work whose complexity required diverse professional skills from different disciplines.
The restorers will demonstrate to the public the operations involved in the multidisciplinary practice of restoring the multi-material work.
