Ligabue Magazine 79

The article is by the curator, Steven Hooper, professor at East-Anglia University and expert of Pacific art. It is the first time that these power clubs are at the centre of an exhibition, and as such, a reason to be proud that this exhibition is held in Venice at the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation. Hooper’s article gives the chance to understand what these clubs were used for; in the past they were quickly discarded as “weapons” by western scholars.

Instead they are works of art, with engravings on both sides of the club; yes, they could have been used as weapons, but only to give the coup de grace than to fight, but they were symbols of authority and prestige, belonging to those of high rank. A celestial theme is the one that the philosopher Massimo Cacciari writes about in “Generating God”, Investigating the figure of Mary who has been announced Her maternity of Christ. Mary “full of grace”. «A shadow envelops Mary and she shines in the icon’s gold. Only in this shadow her nature is revealed. It is necessary to understand this paradox well, it’s not seeing in a sign, a name, in a thing, the shadow of the “reality”, or ideas the mind elaborates as a shadow of reality in itself is inaccessible. It is affirmed that God Himself manifests as an illuminating shadow, that his almightiness becomes shadow, and only in the shadow of this shadow things are revealed in their reality.»

We return to the other side of the world, to Australia, with the article by the italo-australian journalist James Panichi, that writes about the aboriginals and the affirmation of their rights. A journey within the legal world that started in the Seventies, when the colonial concept of terra nullius, created to take over the aboriginal land, started to crumble. According to the colonial government aboriginals could not claim any rights to land because they were semi-nomads; Australia was to be considered nobody’s land, a clean slate, a map to fill in. Women in the Mesopotamian world are the subject of the article by Maria Vittoria Tonietti, assyriologist and professor at the University of Florence. Female Mesopotamia was extremely important and is usually overlooked by modern eyes, especially because in three millenia no queen exercised power on her own. The great female figures have always been consorts that reigned with their husbands.

In Mesopotamia the considerable power of queens was subordinated to the presence of a king: the husband or, usually, the son. Even Semiramis (the best known of Mesopotamian queens) reigned for five years over the Assyrian empire after the death of her husband in 811 BC, but formally she was the regent for her sons. Polygamy, that was widespread in the upper classes, meant that not only the queen could reign as a regent, but that also she had managed to impose her son as heir to the throne over the various secondary wives and concubines’ offspring . A long rute is the one the apple took from the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia to Europe. Cristiano Vernesi, expert of ancient dna, explains it to us. It is probable that merchants that travelled along the Silk Road took the seeds of the apple with them and determined its diffusion. The ancestors of numerous plants and animals that are familiar to us, such as figs, cherries, pears, apricots, bears, deer and boars, originated from the steppes of modern day Kazakistan. The art historian Gianni Dubbini Venier writes about how he retraced the route that the Venetian Nicolò Manucci followed in the XVII century to arrive at the Moghul court in India, where he stayed for some years.

Manucci left two splendid manuscripts that illustrate the people and costumes of the court; the volume with drawings was taken to Paris during the Napoleonic plunder, while the other, with the texts, has remained at the Marciana Library.

Bon voyage!
Alberto Angela