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Palimpsest of Light: a Brush Rescuing Rome
#Exhibitions
Maria Barosso, Demolition of Houses on Via Cremona for Excavations at the Forum of Caesar

Rome in flux, dust in the air, paper and brushes as rescue tools. Maria Barosso paints while the city is dismantled and reassembled: she doesn’t illustrate, she bears witness. The first woman official in the Fine Arts administration, she worked alongside archaeologists with a method that melds rigor and poetry. In her watercolors the skin of the capital is a palimpsest: the Basilica of Maxentius looms like a wounded giant, the Velia opens under the excavation that would create the future Via dei Fori, along the new Via del Mare, the temples of the Forum Boarium and the Forum Holitorium stand apart like luminous relics. And when a find is about to vanish - the Compitum Acilium - her hand saves it forever, fixing its proportions and details before destruction. This survey brings to the fore an artist-archaeologist capable of turning documentation into vision. Over a hundred drawings, prints, and watercolors reveal a grammar of clean lines and translucent washes that delivers historical depth without sacrificing grace. Highlights include cycles devoted to the frescoes of San Biagio, Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Grotto of San Michele a Ninfa (shown alongside the original fragment), the sheets produced beside Giacomo Boni on the Forum site, and a large drawing of the Loggia of the Priory of Rhodes, unveiled for the first time. Barosso doesn’t seek effect, she seeks the truth of forms. In her pages the past is no echo but a lucid present - a visual atlas where art and science join hands to restore to the city the memory of what it has lost.
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