Magnets

Aurelio Amendola - Michelangelo magnet

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tomba di Giuliano de’ Medici, Firenze, 1992

"In the photos that Aurelio shot of the Michelangelesque Prigioni (which is almost a branch of the Laocoön group) he extracts with perspicuous outlines his aim of playing with light (to the point of virtuosity) to keep aroused the hearts and minds of those who see his images. This is a strategy that also obeys one of the fundamental norms of Cicero’s oratory art and that was applied to their works by many Florentine artists of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth: if you want hearing to follow you without distracting you, capture its sense by affecting it. It is this that Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, seemed to suggest, and that Aurelio obliges us to view – halfway between the timid and the melancholy – from the stepped pilasters that frame the niche where he is sitting above his sepulchre. A figure that greets us and is a sensitive paradigm of the whole Michelangelesque series.
- Antonio Natali
In Aurelio Amendola. Il primato della luce, curated by A. Natali and A. Bimbi, exhibition catalogue (Pontassieve), Firenze 2017, pp. 13-20.