One of the most famous works by the 90-year-old Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto ‘Venus of the Rags’ was destroyed by vandals in an arson attack in Naples, Mayor Gaetano Manfredi said on Wednesday. All that was left of the open-air installation was a charred frame.
The artwork had been on display since June 28 and featured a large plaster neoclassical nude Venus picking through a mountain of rags. The figure of Venus was inspired by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 19th century ‘Venus with Apple’.
The 90-year-old artist has made several versions of the artwork which was set on fire by the vandals. The first was created in 1967. Pistoletto told the Corriere della Sera daily newspaper that the reasons for the attack could be many.
“It is a work that calls for regeneration, on the necessity to find a balance and harmony between two minds that are represented on the one hand by beauty, and on the other by consummate consumerism, a disaster,’” the 90-year-old artist said.
He added: “The world is going up in flames anyway. The same spirits that are waging war are the ones that set the Venus on fire.”
Pistoletto is a painter, object artist and art theorist who is one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s through which artists attacked the political, industrial and cultural establishment.
(With Agency Inputs)