ROME.- Arthemisia is presenting the worldwide premiere of A Beautiful World, the new project conceived by Mario Testino, one of the most internationally renowned contemporary photographers.

Born in Peru of Irish and Italian descent, in 1954, Mario Testino travelled to London in 1976 where he began to make a name for himself and to become one of the most innovative fashion and portrait photographers of his generation, his photographs appearing in the leading fashion magazines of the world. A reference point of the greatest distinction in the art of fashion, his images have often become as legendary as the people he photographed, from Kate Moss and Madonna to Naomi Campbell and Diana Princess of Wales.

Terence Pepper, Curator of Photography at the National Portrait Gallery in London, called him the “John Singer Sargent of our times,” whilst the Gallery’s director Charles Saumarez Smith said of Testino’s record-breaking retrospective “Mario Testino PORTRAITS”, 2002 that it revealed the continuum between Testino’s work and the traditions of court painters from Holbein to Reynolds, Goya to Rubens.

Over the past seven years, his search for new subjects beyond the boundaries of the world of fashion has taken his focus down a new creative path, (already touched upon in images as early as 2007) where he has found inspiration in the cultural identities of the countries where he has set his fashion shoots.

Since 2017, he has traversed more than 30 countries, focusing his art upon the exploration of the cultural and traditional uniqueness still to be found in our rapidly globalized world. “A Beautiful World" is Testino's extraordinarily magical and nuanced navigation of the complexities and contrasts of our many ways of belonging: individuality and conformity, community, rituals, ideas of self. symbols. and systems of belief.

“In my travels, I realised that when a country loses the bond between its history and its
traditional dress something truly precious is lost” ---Mario Testino