Ligabue Magazine 82
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Year XLI
1. Semester – June 2023
The time machine that carries us through each edition of Ligabue Magazine, in this issue travels through and celebrates the fifty years of life and activities of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation and the one hundredth anniversary of the “Giancarlo Ligabue” Museum of Natural History in Venice.
We will enter caves that have held extraordinary examples of rock art for thousands of years and learn about the Mapuche Indios who have always inhabited the region known as Araucania, in the far south of the American continent. We will also come face to face with the Giants of Mont’e Prama, huge limestone Nuragic statues, and then lose ourselves in the looks “of art and in art” of five works belonging to the Ligabue Collection.
We are waiting for you to go on this sensational journey!
All aboard! Ligabue Magazine is setting sail and is about to travel, yes, in space, as in past issues, but this time also in time, starting right from the opening article, which traces the fifty years of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation.
The article, by Inti Ligabue, the founder’s son and current chairman, recounts when the Ligabue Study and Research Center, which was transformed into a foundation in 2016, was created in 1973. He recalls some of the most important expeditions, for example the 1972-73 expedition to the Ténéré Desert in Niger, which led to the discovery of a very rich deposit of fossilized dinosaurs. A complete skeleton, excavated during that expedition, is now on display in the “Giancarlo Ligabue” National History Museum, which is turning 100 years old and is the subject of the last article in this issue.
Text and photographs by Domingo Milella investigate rock art within the enclosed space of caves, the only truly dark place in the universe. “The things we look at are what we will remember. I often wonder in this digital time of screens and images only, what is happening to our cave? To our mind? Of all that we are turning into images and merchandise what will we do? What will we remember?” the author wonders.
The strange case of the Mapuche Indios: it is Gabriella Saba who investigates the people of the extreme south of the American continent, from the region known as Araucanía that is now divided between Chile and Argentina. The Mapuche are resilient people, capable of resisting all attempts to wipe them out, perpetrated first by the Inca empire, then by Spanish colonizers, and then by the dictatorship of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. The years from 1973 to 1990 were extremely hard for the natives, but since the repression that affected them, the Mapuche have been able to develop a combativeness that has allowed them to survive, albeit under conditions of economic precariousness unprecedented in their history.
In 1974 a farmer in Mont’e Prama, western Sardinia, plowing his field unearthed the remains of a prehistoric statue, dating from the 9th century B.C. Stefano Salis tells us the fascinating epic of the Giants of Mont’e Prama, the sensational limestone statues unearthed in the excavation campaigns that followed that first – entirely fortuitous – find. Today those sculptures, representing human beings about two meters tall, are on display partly in the Archaeological Museum in Cagliari and partly in the small museum in Cabras, the town closest to the place where the statues’ remains came to light. As soon as the expansion and renovation work on the Cabras building is completed, the Giants will all return together to their final exhibition sites. For the moment they are traveling the world: one of them is now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Statues, and particularly their eyes, are still discussed in Jacopo Veneziani’s article. The article is titled ” Glances ” and tells us about the eyes of art and in art, through five works belonging to the Ligabue Collection, held at the Erizzo-Ligabue Palace. Several of these are faces related to the ceremonial apparatuses of various civilizations: from the sacred masks for funeral and fertility rites of pre-Columbian America to the anthropomorphic batons of Oceania, a crowd of heroes, spirits, deities, and anthropomorphic figures.
As Giambattista Vico himself, author in 1725 of the “Principles of a New Science,” wrote: “We observe all nations, though for immense spaces of places and times distant from each other, dividedly founded, cherish these three human customs: that all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead.”
And finally we return to an anniversary to the second of the birthdays celebrated in this issue and already mentioned at the beginning. It is the century of the Museum of Natural History, from 2019 dedicated to Giancarlo Ligabue. The head of the Venetian institution, Luca Mizzan, writes about it. The museum, officially established in June 1923, brought together in a single location, that of the Fontego dei Turchi, overlooking the Grand Canal, the naturalistic artifacts collected by the collector Teodoro Correr and the scientific ones owned by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, along with other ethnographic artifacts, such as those brought to Venice by Giovanni Miani’s African expeditions.
Enjoy your reading!
Alberto Angela

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