Ligabue Magazine 71

18.00

Second semester 2017
Year XXXVI

Now in its thirty-sixth year, Ligabue Magazine continues to take us on some fascinating new quests for knowledge. The first journey in this issue is in the company of Louis Perrois, a prominent French anthropologist and ethnologist, and an expert on Central Africa. For over a decade, starting in the 1960s, he visited the Fang peoples and collected the last authentic evidence of their history and rites.

Purchase of the digital version only *

* Digital versions from no. 1 to 57 are obtained from a scan of the Magazine. They may therefore have imperfections in the display of texts and images.

More Details
Amount

Often rumoured to be cannibals, the Fang themselves are baffled by this reputation. Moreover, the earliest, more perceptive 19th-century explorers never speak of cannibalism when describing this people who had emigrated from North Africa to present-day Gabon, Cameroon and Congo. The statues and masks of the Fang (the term is used for a few of many similar ethnic groups, but only by Westerners) are well-known and are now in some of the finest private collections and major museums in the world; immersed in oils and essences, some masks still even perspire.

Not surprisingly, these masterpieces made a deep impression on many French artists in the 1920s and ’30s. Adriano Favaro explores another piece of history, featuring maize, a food imported to the Old Continent after the Europeans had discovered the Americas. Along with the potato, maize drove a European demographic boom. It is also one of the recurring motifs in The World That Wasn’t There, the exhibition organised by the Ligabue Foundation and due to run in Venice from 12 January to 30 June 2018 at the Palazzo Loredan. In the Olmec, Maya and Aztec mythologies, and in the pre-Inca and Inca legends, maize is depicted with all its symbolism and powers. Dozens of ceramic works, jade sculptures and gold objects in the showcases of the Venetian exhibition evoke the majesty of a plant that was the “green gold” in the so-called Columbian exchange. A visionary dreamer.

But a host of other terms would also be required to describe Piranesi, the etcher and architect born in Mogliano (Venice), who in the 18th century played an unsurpassed role in envisaging the magnificence and grandeur of architecture. In his inimitable style, he described and designed the relationship between humanity and forms, surfaces and volumes. His still partially unexplored story is retold by Alessandro Borgato, an expert on antiquarian prints, who reconstructs Piranesi’s career with some exemplary images, such as the fantastic, dreamlike “prisons”. Anyone travelling the roads of Baja California should pluck up courage, leave the tarmac highway and even the recently marked dirt tracks and let archaeologist Natalino Russo guide them, either on horseback or in off-road vehicles, in search of the signs of the prehistoric cultures of the Cochimà­, who left thousands of rock engravings and paintings in the region. Russo and other experts are engaged in the work of describing and cataloguing one of the oldest and least-known chapters in humanity’s memoirs, when time moved with the stars.

What do Babel and the north-eastern Italian town of Palmanova have in common? How are the towns of Pienza and Sabioneta linked? Or, in short: what is the history of ideal cities from Antiquity to the present-day? Fabio Isman, a writer, journalist, and scholar, takes us back in time and space on a fascinating intellectual adventure to explore the idea of constructing perfection with architecture. Still full of endless surprises, the history of this notion can be charted by travelling through Italy, a country rich in traces of the ideal city. Green marble of Thessaly, white Parian, ancient red Tenario, Egyptian red porphyry, green Cipollino or marble from the island of Proconnesus situated in the Marmara Sea, giving rise to the Greek word marmaros (marble). We find them all (along with many others) in St Mark’s in Venice, a church that has an incredible wealth of marble and ancient stones in the Roman-Byzantine tradition. Fabrizio Bizzarini, a Venetian archaeologist, describes these marbles and stones, mostly brought back from Constantinople as booty from the Fourth Crusade. Their story is part of the history of the Mediterranean and the relationship between Venice and what was known first as Byzantium and then as the Sublime Porte, a neverending story between West and East.

Bon Voyage!

4 REASONS TO BUY FROM OUR WEB SHOP

1. DIVULGATION, RESEARCH, INSPIRATION

All products in the e-shop are inspired by the work of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation and follow its divulgation and journey of discovery initiatives.

2. JOIN A COMMUNITY

Shopping on our site means getting informed, learning, being part of an ideal and inclusive community that shares the same values

3. KNOW AND MAKE KNOWN

Easy and direct access to a vast archive of catalogs, magazines, individual thematic articles but also to exclusive clothing and items in just a few hours at your home

4. CHOOSE TO BE GREEN

Quality and environmental care in the choice of materials for an increasingly sustainable future.

SIMILAR PRODUCTS YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN

Products in the cart