On Thursday, January 15, at 8:30 p.m. at the Casa del Musichiere (Via Manzoni, 2), the IX Festival della Cultura di Moriago della Battaglia will host a new event dedicated to cultural knowledge and reflection as part of the course on leavened products “Moriago in fermentum” curated by Giovanni Favero. The highlight of the meeting is the lecture “Bread in the history of art” by the renowned art critic and historian Lorena Gava, who will take the audience on a fascinating journey through the history of bread, from ancient civilizations to contemporary languages.
Through a selection of images of works of art ranging from Pharaonic Egypt to the present day, the lecture traces the ancient history of bread, revealing its often unexpected symbols and meanings. From simple food to powerful spiritual metaphor, bread has traversed the centuries as an element capable of holding together the cycle of nature and human ingenuity, constantly oscillating between the sacred and the profane. For example, in medieval and Renaissance painting, its presence is strongly linked to religious iconography, from the Last Suppers to Eucharistic miracles, but also to the everyday dimension of convivial scenes. With the modern age, its role changed radically and, in contemporary art, bread ceased to be merely ‘food’ to be represented and became a living material and a tool for critical reflection on society.
Artists such as Giorgio Morandi still exalted its formal purity and silent everyday nature in still lifes, while Salvador Dalí transformed it into an object laden with desire and ambiguity. Subsequent avant-garde movements went beyond the traditional figurative canon, using bread to question the duration of the work of art, consumption, and the present time. This perspective is reflected in the work of artists such as Piero Manzoni with his Achrome series and Daniel Spoerri, one of the leading exponents of Eat Art, who fixes food and bread residues as if they were archaeological finds of the contemporary world.
In short, this event intertwines art, history, and material culture to offer Festival audiences an original perspective on an element that is simple and universal, yet also capable of telling the story of humankind and society through the centuries.
