Piazza Guidi, redesigned by Mimmo Paladino, is inaugurated in Vinci. A striking urban reconfiguration in the space in front of the new entrance to the Museo Leonardiano.
The reconfiguration of Piazza Guidi.
The urban reconfiguration of Piazza Guidi is part of the expansion project of the Museo Leonardiano, which recently saw the opening of a new entrance and new exhibition spaces in the Palazzina Uzielli, located just a few hundred meters from the Castello dei Conti Guidi, which until now had been the museum’s sole location. The unification of the Castello dei Conti Guidi (the original core of the Museo Leonardiano), the Palazzina Uzielli, and the adjacent Piazza Guidi into a single museum itinerary created the need to give the new museum entrance a recognizable public identity—an image with visual strength and symbolic significance equal to that which the Castello dei Conti Guidi has acquired over time. With this goal, in 2003 the Municipality of Vinci launched a call for ideas for the creation of a work of high artistic value in Piazza Guidi, one that could symbolically dialogue with the museum itself and with Leonardo’s legacy, starting from a contemporary perspective.
Until now, Piazza Guidi had remained an empty space in contrast to the commanding presence of the Castello dei Conti Guidi, the surrounding landscape, and the nearby streets, which possess a character somewhere between the picturesque and the monumental. The short cobbled stretch of Via La Pira, which connects the area around the fortress to Piazza Guidi, opens onto a hillside landscape of rare beauty that fades into the Pisan mountains drawn by Leonardo in the Madrid Codices. At the same time, it also allows one to appreciate the enduring visual correspondence between the rooftops of Vinci and those depicted in the 19th century by Telemaco Signorini. The redesigned square thus fills that void, and indeed aspires to take on a life of its own—marking the museum’s expansion and reinforcing the perception of a reweaving of paths between the two streets that frame the historic center.
The call for ideas “A Square for Leonardo”
The competition for a redesign of Piazza Guidi—an area that had, until then, lacked identity, yet stood out in the hilly landscape of the Montalbano slopes and was part of a medieval village reinterpreted and restored between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following an approach common to many urban and architectural interventions in Tuscany and beyond—saw the participation of some of the leading figures on the international contemporary art scene, including, in addition to Mimmo Paladino, Ilya Kabakov, Anish Kapoor, Joseph Kosuth, and Jannis Kounellis. The project, carried out by the Municipality of Vinci in collaboration with the Associazione Arte Continua, co-financed by the European Community, and overseen by a committee composed of Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Mario Cristiani, and Romano Nanni, led to the presentation of five proposals.
The proposals by Anish Kapoor, Ilya Kabakov, and Jannis Kounellis are essentially installation-based. Kabakov’s wing aims to evoke one of the most well-known icons of Leonardo’s imagery; resting on a broken edge, it alludes to the possible failures of the desire for knowledge, humanizing the genius. Kapoor’s well, on the other hand, seems to emphasize the spring-like allure of water—so dear to Leonardo—reinforcing it with another kind of birth: that of the rainbow. Kounellis, almost following in the footsteps of the fantastical 15th-century machine books by Giovanni Fontana, erects a monolith in the center of the square—a hostile presence, a barrier, and at the same time an empty space to be traversed, an invitation to the play of intelligence.
Joseph Kosuth and Mimmo Paladino, on the other hand, proposed interventions that engage the entire square. Kosuth interprets the neutral irregularity of the piazza as the possible outline of a new page, on which to inscribe Leonardo’s enigmatic calligraphy and architectural reflections. To this end, he repaves the square, almost as if spreading a compound made with pigment from the typical Montalbano stone. Paladino’s proposal, which was selected as the winner, offered an ambitious overall project that fully addressed the challenges of reconfiguring the square and highlighting the new entrance to the museum.
The projects in competition, along with other works by the participating artists, were featured in the exhibition Una Piazza per Leonardo. Cinque progetti per il nuovo ingresso del Museo Leonardiano organized in Vinci from June 15 to September 14, 2003.
The intervention by Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino, in collaboration with architect Nicola Fiorillo, reconfigures the square with a grid of geometries, of decompositions and recompositions of planes, which seems to signal both the sedimentary and accidental origin of the square and, at the same time, gives it a discipline shaped by the suggestion of geometry. He also creates a pathway leading to the new entrance and a complex marker for it: a basin with a fountain, above which gently rests a twelve-pointed three-dimensional star in aluminum, just touching the overflowing water. The space is characterized by a series of planes, connected to each other at different heights and inclinations, made from slabs of Cardoso stone. On these planes, the artist creates engravings with glass tiles or silver blades that recall his well-known iconographic universe, inspired by the idea of universality and the autonomous, continuous reusability of a reservoir of signs from time immemorial—including the legacy of the 15th century. Within the perimeter, most of the inclined planes are walkable and form a pedestrian area, linked to the surrounding road system, serving as a connection between the Palazzina Uzielli and the Town Hall, whose rear entrance also faces the square. Several low stone benches are placed near the fountain for resting. A carefully designed lighting system, developed together with Filippo Cannata—already the author of the lighting project.
Lighting designer of the Hortus Conclusus in Benevento, he highlights the three-dimensional and sculptural aspect of the space. Everything is taken care of down to the smallest detail to create a magical scenographic effect, in line with the public identity of the place and with the artistic and scientific figure of its main inspirer, Leonardo da Vinci. In the Piazza Guidi intervention, Paladino expresses his poetics of de-structuring volumes and geometric fragmentation of planes, already evident in some of his recent sculptural exhibitions where the line between art exhibition and architectural model display is subtly blurred. With the Piazza in Vinci—effectively a large artwork to be lived in and experienced by people—the Campanian artist develops his own complete architectural vision: the concept of architecture as expression and expansion of artistic language.