La mia prima patria sono stati i libri

With ‘Vanitas con libri’ (Vanitas with Books), Rinaldo Invernizzi has created a new, site-specific cycle of paintings for the Libreria Sansoviniana, the historical reading room of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, responding to the rich ceiling- and wall decoration painted by some of the greatest artists of sixteenth-century Venice such as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

Central to Invernizzi’s work in this cycle is the book’s iconographic value, as represented in the library’s famous wall paintings of the Philosophers, depicting imaginary portraits of great men from Antiquity, handling large and heavy books. Painted in chromatic tones, from oranges to reds that implode in purple – the splendour of the dawns and sunsets – Invernizzi uses the genre of vanitas to reflect on the transience of earthly pursuits and the eternal value of faith.

The title of the exhibition ‘La mia prima patria sono stati i libri’ (My first homeland were books), was chosen by the artist himself, citing Marguerite Yourcenar, the French author, who describes in her famous Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel from 1951, the confrontation of oneself through books via the voice of her most famous literary alter ego, the Roman Emperor Hadrian.