Antonio Corradini and Luigi Ghirri: A Dialogue Between Marble and Vision in Venice

Sculpture and Photography in Conversation at Fondazione Querini Stampalia

At the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, until 12 April 2026, an exhibition takes shape that challenges our way of seeing. Disapparire. Antonio Corradini and Luigi Ghirri is not a simple display, but a conceptual journey that weaves together sculpture, marble, and photography in an unexpected confrontation, set in the heart of Venice, a city long suspended between appearance and dissolution.

The juxtaposition of Antonio Corradini, a leading figure of eighteenth-century Venetian and Neapolitan art, and Luigi Ghirri, a key figure in twentieth-century Italian photography, may at first seem disconcerting. The former is renowned for his extraordinary ability to transform marble into a vibrating, almost immaterial substance; the latter developed a sober, anti-rhetorical photographic language, grounded in attention to the everyday and to the limits of perception. Yet it is precisely within this historical and linguistic distance that a surprisingly coherent dialogue emerges.

The unifying thread of the exhibition is the theme of the veil, understood not only as an iconographic element but as a conceptual device. In Corradini’s work, the sculpted veil becomes an extreme challenge to matter: marble loses its hardness and turns into skin, fabric, breath. Veiled female figures, as well as sacred subjects, seem to exist in a transitional dimension, balanced between presence and disappearance. The viewer’s gaze is called upon to complete what is never fully given.

The heart of the exhibition stems from the rediscovery of a delicate marble medallion depicting a veiled female face, attributed to Corradini and originating from the Foundation’s storerooms. This Veiled Faith, fragile yet intensely powerful, becomes the starting point for a comparison with other fundamental works by the artist: the terracotta modello of the Veiled Christ, conceived for the celebrated Cappella Sansevero in Naples, and a marble bust preserved at Ca’ Rezzonico. In all these works, sculpture does not assert its mass, but rather seems to deny it, transforming marble into a surface of retained light.

In this context, sculpture is never a definitive statement; instead, it is a question addressed to the gaze. Matter appears on the verge of dissolving, as if the work were traversed by an internal tension between what manifests itself and what eludes perception. Marble thus becomes a means through which to reflect on the precariousness of vision and on the responsibility of the viewer.

Engaging in dialogue with these works is the photography of Luigi Ghirri, through a selection of images from the Fondo Ghirri, now on loan to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Here too, vision is anything but assertive. Landscapes shrouded in fog, marginal architectures, low horizons, and milky skies construct suspended images, permeated by time and memory. For Ghirri, photographing does not mean capturing reality, but acknowledging its irreducible opacity.

The exhibition is not based on formal similarities, but rather on a shared epistemological attitude. Both Corradini and Ghirri work at the threshold of visibility, on the boundary between what appears and what withdraws. If in sculpture the veil is carved into stone, in photography the veil is made of diffused light, distance, and visual silence. In both cases, the image never presents itself as definitive, but as an experience to be traversed slowly.
The exhibition design reinforces this idea of threshold. An extremely thin white fabric covers the walls, transforming the exhibition space into a muffled, almost rarefied environment. The works do not impose themselves upon the gaze, but gradually emerge depending on distance and angle. Visitors are invited to slow down, to accept uncertainty, to linger in doubt.