FRAGMENTATION OF THE MYTH– Myth often proves incomprehensible to human intelligence. As he did with other myths in previous projects, Rosselló (Xema Rosselló) has fragmented Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” to approach its mystery, perhaps one of the most hidden enigmas of the great master of the Italian Renaissance.
THE BATTLE OF ANGHIARI. – The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo’s great lost work, has been the catalyst that has driven Rosselló to create various variants based on the master’s preliminary drawings, the small-format paper copy by Peter Paul Rubens preserved at the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Tavola Doria from the Uffizi in Florence, by an unknown painter and often attributed to Leonardo.
SEEK AND FIND, the unsettling motto on the green Florentine standard crowning a fresco by Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, superimposed on the wall where it seems Leonardo’s experimental work might still be found, has led the artist to discover, in Rubens’ copy of the battle, a horse that could be a clear precedent for the horse in Pablo Picasso’s < Guernica >.
On the eroded stones of Tarragona’s Roman wall, Rosselló has found signs reminiscent of Leonardo’s preliminary drawings of the battle’s cavalry groups, just as Leonardo observed the damp stains on walls and had his students observe them, recognizing suggestive and blurred forms akin to “sfumato”.
