Giovanni Michelucci fotografo

edited by G. Fanelli

Florentines passing by the railway station of Santa Maria Novella or glimpsing from the highway the pale green crest of the Church of St John the Baptist have a direct, day-to-day experience of two significant moments in the artistic evolution of Giovanni Michelucci, the architect who perhaps more than any other in this century has managed to leave an indelible mark on a difficult, diffident city.

The exhibition “Giovanni Michelucci fotografo” (Fiesole, palazzina Mangani, May 4-27, 2001), promoted by the Fondazione Michelucci and edited by Giovanni Fanelli, aims to explore a little-known side to the great architect’s personality: his interest in photography. An interest which was neither continuous nor systematic: for Michelucci’s photographs are never an end in themselves, results of a research of beautiful images, but rather fragments of a never-interrupted dialogue with the architectures of the past and the present, with the cities in which he lived or that he just visited, with the world of nature, with his loved ones, with memories – one never finds spaces alone, or persons alone, but always the two together in their mutual relationship; notes, one might call them, and as such “revelatory of precise interests or feelings, and revelatory of a mode of seeing”.