PALAZZO BALDESCHI – PERUGIA
June 17, 2025 – January 6, 2026
Fondazione Perugia presents EXTRA Ancient Signs/Contemporary Visions, a major project with the dual objective of enhancing and publicizing the recent acquisition of approximately 1,700 parchments from the Albertini Collection, while also showcasing its ongoing vitality in dialogue with eighteen contemporary artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Emilio Isgrò, Maria Lai, David Tremlett, Gianni Dessì, and many others, creating new and unexpected juxtapositions.
EXTRA. Ancient Signs/Contemporary Visions is the latest project from Fondazione Perugia. Following exhibitions dedicated to Antonio Canova, the Perugino-Burri dialogue, and reflections on the theme of Nature/Utopia, the exhibition presents an original approach to establishing a dialogue between the ancient and the contemporary in an exhibition that can also be considered dual, as it explores the relationship between image and sign, icon and word.
Curated by Marco Tonelli, the idea for this exhibition was born in 2024 when the Perugia Foundation acquired a selection from the Albertini Collection consisting of approximately 1,700 parchment covers dating from the 13th to 15th centuries. These are prized documentary coverings, finely decorated and painted on parchment covers that once held ancient municipal, notarial, and administrative registers belonging to podestàs, captains of the people, and judges of the Municipality of Perugia. Inside, they contain lists, texts, and judicial notes such as testimonies of accusations, reports of damage to crops and livestock, and records of food supplies and distribution.
One parchment in particular features the word Extraordinariorum, which comes from the Imperial-era Latin term cognitio extra ordinem, indicating legal norms outside the traditional framework. This term has since entered everyday language to describe something unusual, unexpected, or exceptional. Hence the idea of creating something truly extraordinary, combining a selection of approximately 100 parchments with more than 40 works by 18 contemporary Italian and international artists. The selection criteria are sometimes very stringent, sometimes merely evocative, still others iconographic or typological, if not thematic and material, or connecting word and image, understanding the image as a word, a visual puzzle, or a speaking figure.
The idea behind the exhibition is to create references that, while not making the ancient parchments clearer and more legible, update them in a temporal return between the past of the artifact and the present of the contemporary artwork. Thus, to see the ancient with an (a)historical gaze and observe the present with a perspective tied to tradition, in an exchange between past and present that makes art always contemporary and perceptually re-enacts the ancient image.
