This shoe sculpure is part of a series of 20 sculptures of shoes dedicated to the most relevant women in history, literature, cinema and comics. This project has been commissioned by Superstudio Milan and ANCI, and chosen as opening event for the MICAM 2006.
Lucrezia Borgia
First of all this exhibition talks about the collective imaginary, better all that passing through the filters of mind stays inside with no way out. They are details, memory impressions, anything that hits our imagination with no reversibility. They are common places, not always the truth but popular beliefs brought to us by History, with its mysteries tied to fragmentary and inaccurate sources that we catch in aspects such as legends or itching details, that are the most difficult to unveil. Sometimes happens that the guilts of parents fall upon the children, as for Lucrezia Borgia. She never poisoned anyone, she has never been incestuous, she was just woman of her time, with a father that was a centralizer, a boss, an intrigante and a sanguinary man. A brother, Caesar, that killed her husband (however, chosen by his father) the only one that she was really in love with, Alfonso d’Aragona, for reasons of power. In spite of this, I create her sandal which Is based on what everybody associates to the name of Lucrezia: poison. Her heel is a little vial of poison (before someone realized… actually it is a graduated plastic tube for urine). For this I beg her pardon! Lucrezia was a cultured woman, that perfectly understood different languages. She felt a great reciprocated passion, for Bembo, one of the most famous writers of that time; unfortunately this passion is not enough to change her reputation. Lucrezia had artistic skills and her verses, preserved among the manuscripts of the Ambrosian, prove it.
Courtesy of Daniele Fontana at Whitenoisephotography 2007.
