MILAN.- Christie’s Milano will be presenting Mapping Modern and Contemporary Art, an online auction running from 20 January to 10 February 2021. Building on the concept of The Grand Tour an educational visit through Europe and beyond, which took place in the 17th- and 18th-century, Christie’s will create a sale, mapping Italian modern and contemporary art from all 20 regions, including works by international artists who have been inspired by the country or have lived and worked in Italy for a period of time or have been strongly inspired by Italian culture.

At the time and once arrived in Italy, the Grand Tour participants would visit Turin and Milan, then might spend a few months in Florence at the Uffizi gallery, showcasing in one space the monuments of High Renaissance paintings and Roman sculpture. After a side trip to Pisa, the tourists would move on to Padua, Bologna and Venezia. From Venice the travellers went to Rome to study the ancient ruins and the masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and architecture of Rome's Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Some travellers also visited Naples and beyond to the main islands, Sicily and Sardinia.

Some 300 years later Christie’s will conduct a similar tour through Italy by offering works by artists from all 20 regions, amongst them some very well-known and culturally influential spots and some others remaining to be discovered.

LOMBARDIA
Mario Radice born in Como in 1900 and died in Milano in 1987, was fascinated by rationalist architecture and was one of the first Italian artists to break from figurative art to join the abstract movement flourishing across Europe at the time.

His works were shown in nine Venice Biennale shows from 1940 to 1979. In 2007 some of his works were included in two big exhibits held in Milan's Royal Palace: Camera con vista and Kandinskji and Italian abstract art. Like the work of the other founder of the Italian abstractist school Manlio Rho, Radice's art is recognizable for pure and harmonic geometric shapes in warm colors, like in the work Composiz. R.S.P., dating from 1949 (estimate: Euro 6,000-8,000).




EMILIA-ROMAGNA
Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) was a photographer known for his colour images of gardens, monuments, and the studio of Giorgio Morandi, which he photographed in 1989. He started his career in the 1970s. Influenced by conceptual art, he created his first two series, Atlante (1973) and Kodachrome (1978), where his cropped images of the landscape were presented with a deadpan, often ironic wit and a continuous anthropological engagement with his surroundings. The compositions and hues of his photographs suggested subtle emotional tones and a meticulously rich way of viewing the world, as well as the role of images within it. Modena is one of such images that was taken in 1973 (estimate: Euro 4,000-6,000).

UMBRIA
Piero Dorazio (1927-2005), is known for his gestural, atmospheric paintings of grids crosshatched with fluid brushstrokes. The 1950s was an important time for Dorazio, he travelled widely, encountering new artistic movements that helped to broaden his aesthetic horizons. He visited America in 1953 and was exposed to the Abstract Expressionism. Closer to home, he found inspiration in the work of Italian Futurists, whose exploration of the relationship between colour, form and velocity would come to resonate with Dorazio’s reticoli. A good representation of his art is given by the work Senza Titolo, dating from 1959 (estimate: Euro 7,000-10,000).

LAZIO
While stationed in Rome for his militaty service, Franco Angeli (1935-1988) met a sculptor named Edgardo Mannucci. Mannucci had connections with a painter called Alberto Burri and Angeli found the painter's work fascinating. He adapted Burri’s techniques in his own work, eventually borrowing the worn-out materiality of the Catrami (Tars). In fact, the overall aesthetic of broken or ruined things became a key aspect of Angeli’s work. The painting in the sale Apertura a sinistra is a very early work, dating from 1960, the second year Angeli took up painting (estimate: Euro 15,000-20,000).

SICILIA
In the 1950s, Carla Accardi (1924-2014) was involved in the wide-reaching attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the hybridization of geometric abstraction and gestural painting, whilst using a reduced two colour palette to explore the relationship between figure and ground. Rossoverde dates from 1966 and is offered with an estimate of Euro 25,000-35,000.

A Grand Tour in the 17th or 18th century could last anywhere from several months to several years. This time, The Italian Tour will only take 20 days and the online visitor would just have a day per region to spend on his tour through Modern and Contemporary Italian Art. The sale will be online from 20 January to 10 February 2021.

The legacy of the Grand Tour lives on to the modern day and is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel.