Factum Arte’s 3D printed parts on display at Giulio Romano exhibit

Factum Foundation is working on several exhibitions which will open this autumn in Italy and elsewhere: Giulio Romano – La forza delle cose (from October 8th) will present the unique 3D printed versions of five objects based on drawings by Giulio Romano (1499-1546) at Palazzo Te. To coincide with the exhibition, Fondazione Palazzo Te and Factum Foundation will launch the workshop ‘Fare Arte 2022: Conservazione Digitale.

The Giulio Romano – The Force of Things project celebrates the creative energy of Giulio Romano as a designer and the power of his inventions, capable of animating the European courts. Weapons, vases, jugs, plates, and even salt shakers and knives are made of precious materials and decorated with shapes in which classic motifs and natural elements fully highlighted the taste and magnificence of European courts, helping to define their absolute exceptionality compared to the dimension of everyday life.

Thanks to the inexhaustible imagination of Giulio Romano, in the sixteenth century the court of Mantua became an outpost in the field of European design, capable of influencing the taste for luxury objects at the courts of Spain, Fontainebleau and Prague. The exhibition, therefore, collects a vast body of drawings by Giulio Romano for weapons and objects in silver, among which works from the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and from Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford are distinguished. Particularly noteworthy is the presence of numerous sheets from the Strahov Code, which belonged to Jacopo Strada and kept in Prague, exhibited here for the first time after a careful restoration. The careful selection of the drawings illustrates how Giulio Romano found the ideal dimension in design to express his most imaginative, playful and original vein.

Exceptionally, in collaboration with Factum Foundation and Factum Arte, five objects designed by Giulio Romano will be recreated as three-dimensional objects in silver using the most sophisticated digital techniques and the best-specialized artisan laboratories.

To accompany Giulio Romano’s inventions, some drawings by famous sixteenth-century artists will be exhibited, among which Michelangelo and Francesco Salviati stand out, and a selection of refined objects of Italian and European design of the sixteenth century. An entire section of the exhibition will be dedicated to arms and armor, with important loans from the Bargello Museum in Florence, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, and the Real Armería in Madrid, in particular, the famous shield of Emperor Charles V of Madrid which will exceptionally come exhibited together with the relative drawing by Giulio Romano, a unique case in which both the drawing and the object made on the artist’s project have survived to the present day.

Another important section of the exhibition is dedicated to the objects that shone on the sideboard and on the prince’s table: with their repertoire of monsters, animals and metamorphic human figures, plates, jugs, and basins in gilded silver testify on the one hand the imaginative creativity of the sixteenth-century artists and on the other hand the excellent technical mastery of their contemporary goldsmiths.