FMR is a bi-monthly magazine published simultaneously in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

 

To preserve the magazine in your library, FMR offers its subscribers an elegant library case for the 6 annual issues.

 

Editorial for Issue 19

When “looks” are under discussion, we would do as well to reckon with that of Medusa, at once so captivating and so deadly. “Why is it the face which causes us to fall in love?” asked Giacomo Casanova, who knew something about it. FMR’s “look” is of another kind: it is cast lovingly upon things, it calls for a different kind of complicity, a different reciprocity. It is a luxury of the mind, in the very act of pleasing the eye: it is awareness, not some obscure seeking after loss. In this sense, it is a European “look”, perhaps indeed a more specifically Italian one. It is not a yearning for some unattainable amalgam of all things Italian. It is identity, pure and simple. In short, it is what shines out from amidst the dazzle of gems and metal created by Wolvinius, a barbarian – though the term is inapt, at a time when the classical had already worked its magic upon “barbarity” – called upon to make a monument for the mortal remains of Bishop Ambrose, proudly signing himself “Vuolvinius Magister Faber”. Magister, faber. Knowledge, knack. Genius, technique. Art, craftsmanship of the highest order. This is the starting-point for a journey leading us right down to Gianfilippo Usellini, another magister faber who chose his allegiances with care, and who realised that in the twentieth century the great myth of art could perhaps only be dreamed of, but still upon a wall, and still within a work of architecture; with the landscape outside. And so on to our own day. To Vasc Bendini, a master of “Veronicas” which may be both persuasive and dramatic, but which are always full o light, a brave golden light. “Light. In fact,” as Bendini himself says, “we do not know quite what light is, except that it has almost nothing to do with reality. We tend to think of the sun, or artificial forms of light, but that is no the light I am referring to. Light is way of representing things in manner that is... how can I put it… absolute, perhaps it is internal, not external, and so has nothing to do with objective things. But it is a light which sustains me, which sustains us all.” And so we end as we began: with matters sacred.

 

Flaminio Gualdoni