Sacred Space

Piero Sartogo, Nathalie Grenon - Carla Accardi, Chiara Dynys, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mimmo Paladino, Piero Ruffo, Marco Tirelli, Giuseppe Uncini

The Nivola museum, which has been interested from the beginning in the intersections between art and architecture (one of the main themes of Costantino Nivola’s work in the mid-20th century), presents an exhibition on a project that brought that relationship into the contemporary world. In 1998, the architects Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon were commissioned to design the church of the Santo Volto di Gesù, a new church in the Magliana neighborhood of Rome. The architects’ thinking was based from the start on awareness of the relationship between public space and religious space, two spheres brought together in the project. Indeed, the church parvis became a piazza, the public square that the neighborhood—lacking in social spaces—had never had.

The building develops starting from a cross located outside, in the vanishing point where all of the lines, in both plan and elevation, converge, articulating the volume of the architecture in two parts: the Aula Ecclesiale and the Parrocchia. Lacking a bell tower but boasting a large half-dome, the church, built between 2003 and 2006, hosts a group of highly evocative artworks by a number of leading figures in Italian art: Carla Accardi, Chiara Dynys, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mimmo Paladino, Piero Ruffo, Marco Tirelli, and Giuseppe Uncini.

The project, based on a direct relationship between art and architectural space, explores the links between religious and artistic expression, as well as between ethics and aesthetics. As described by Achille Bonito Oliva, “it is a miracle of artitecture, the fruit of an interweaving wrought by a contemporary who chooses the language of crossing borders to talk about our destiny in the form of a new humanism.”

The church of the Magliana cites the great tradition of medieval cathedral worksites and creates an ideal link between two themes of 20th century art and architecture: on the one hand, the synthesis of the arts and on the other, art sacré.

The exhibition reconstructs this project through a large plastic model of the church from the Vatican Museums, drawings and models of the artworks, and films. A selection of works by the artists who were involved in the project offers an opportunity to compare their religious work with that developed independently. 

Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon
The architects Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon, have tackled a wide and diverse range of design themes: from large scale city planning (the master plan for the administrative complex of the international organization OECD in Paris, a new urban campus for the University of Bologna, a new urban space in Siena) to architecture (the new Italian Embassy in Washington, the Bank of Rome headquarters in New York) and industrial design (collaborations with companies such as Tiffany & Co., Poltrona Frau, Fontana Arte, Richard Ginori, and more). To paraphrase Richard Meier, in their work, the interweaving of ideas about the creation of space, ideas about the materiality of the surface, and ideas about the relationship between built form and the urban fabric reveals an acute understanding of the specifics of each situation that allows them to make an important contribution to architectural culture and express a clear message.

The Museo Nivola
The Museo Nivola in Orani (Nuoro), located in the middle of a park in the heart of Sardinia, is devoted to the work of Costantino Nivola (Orani, 1911–East Hampton, 1988), an important figure in the international movement for the “synthesis of the arts” (the integration of the visual arts and architecture) who played a critical role in the cultural exchange between Italy and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. The museum has a permanent collection comprising more than 200 sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Nivola and organizes temporary exhibitions focused primarily on the relationship between art, architecture, and the landscape. 

Main sponsor: Fondazione di Sardegna
Institutional Partners: Autonomous Region of Sardinia, City of Orani