An installation created for the ‘Amore mio’ exhibition at Palazzo Ricci in Montepulciano, which opened on 30 June 1970. Overturning customary organisational practice, sixteen artists ‘self-convened’ through a series of consultations, called on Achille Bonito Oliva to ‘contradict the role of art critic’.1 The artists involved were Carlo Alfano, Getulio Alviani, Mario Ceroli, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Renato Mambor, Gino Marotta, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Mario Nanni, Maurizio Nannucci, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paolo Scheggi and Cesare Tacchi; Piero Sartogo was in charge of ‘image coordination’. Each artist was given a room in the building to display ‘the matrices of their expressive position’.2 Mauri covered the walls of his assigned space with a series of canvases reprising scenes and details from the Trionfo della morte (Triumph of Death), a fourteenth-century fresco in Pisa’s Camposanto attributed to Andrea di Cione di Arcangelo, known as Orcagna.3 He selected, decontextualised and reproduced damned souls, symbolic figures, devils and skeletons in brightly coloured silkscreens on coloured canvases. Above them, two elements from the same canvas, shaped and turned inside out, show a rabbit and an angel-Lucifer projecting toward the room’s interior. The audience was able to direct a revolving spotlight attached to the floor in the centre at will to cast light on details in the otherwise dark room. Through the contrast between medieval iconography and modern graphic rendering, Mauri identified an ‘expressive stance’ between historical roots and new stylistic approaches, adopting a modus operandi that, elsewhere, the artist would refer to as ‘a present-day use of the past’.4

1. See A. Bonito Oliva, ‘Autocritico automobile’, in Il Formichiere, Foligno, 1977, pp. 157–58.
2. Ibid.
3. The fresco is now attributed by scholars almost unanimously to Buonamico di Martino, known as Buffalmacco.
4. F. Mauri, ‘Note su “zeichen-ung” (Warum ein Gedanke einen Raum verpestet?)’, in Proposta, no. 2–3, Benevento, 1972, p. 36.