For the generous shapes it has of Botero, for the big pins stuck it would seem a San Sebastian. Despite its roundness, the “Suffering Majesty”, a sculpture by Gaetano Pesce recently installed at the entrance to the Ferrara fair, induces angular and contrasting opinions.
The work, already exhibited in Piazza Duomo in Milan in April last year, carries with it a trail of disputes from the female universe (and not only) regarding the symbolism expressed by the sculpture, eight meters high and four heavy tons, inspired by the famous “Up” armchair that the artist designed in ’69 which later became a symbol of Italian design. Consisting of a seat that looks like a welcoming mother’s womb and a backrest that alludes to the breast with four hundred pins stuck, the sculpture also shows a large ball to which it is tied by a chain and six ferocious animals on the sides.
The intent is to represent violence against women and their imprisonment, while around the halo of predators, it symbolizes male violence. Pesce wanted to donate this sort of allegory to the Este city also thanks to the interest of Vittorio Sgarbi, president of “Ferrara arte”. However, as already happened in Milan, the work provoked a controversy that Sgarbi himself hoped for on the day of the inauguration, last 8 March, provocatively wishing her even “a vandalization” given that “otherwise we talk about it too little and becomes the work of a regime architect while Gaetano Pesce it is the anti-Boers “.
The critic was immediately satisfied. If in Milan the women of “Non una di less” had explained that sculpture “reifies what it would like to criticize” and part of the feminist world had stigmatized “the woman’s body represented in a deformed way and subjected to public mockery”, in Ferrara the controversy has divided both the political camps and the female universe. “La donna è un mobile” is the title of a letter sent to the press with a hundred signatures at the bottom in which the “Majesty” is defined as “an old vision because it is stereotyped and outdated” because “it does not take into account the cultural change that it has invested society in recent decades “and therefore it is” a work that makes society as a whole go back “.
“The artistic value of sculpture is not in question – he explains Ilaria Baraldi, Pd city councilor and vice-president of the Equal Opportunities Commission – but the representation that is given of the woman, without head or limbs, without personality and pierced. In short, the woman once again as an object, passive, and not an active subject “. Of a different opinion is the president of the aforementioned commission, as well as a councilor of Forza Italia, Paola Peruffo also supported by the coordinator of Italia viva Licia Barbieri:” I believe that different ideas can be found in any work of art, but it shouldn’t be the case for triggering political speculation. The sculpture ended up in the overheated climate that inflames Ferrara. After all, there were also controversies when it was the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala who exhibited the “Majesty” “.
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