Giovanna Di Marco's 'Museo di sabbia' Rewrites Art History Through Personal Experience

Giovanna Di Marco's new book 'Museo di sabbia' (Del Vecchio Editore, 2025, 264 pp., €18) offers an unconventional journey through art history filtered through subjective experience. The title echoes Jorge Luis Borges, whose phrase appears in the epigraph. Di Marco structures the book as a three-room gallery—Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary—where art discourse becomes the voice of art itself. She blends genres, moving between epistolary homage to Maria Bellonci's 'Rinascimento Privato' (with a letter from Botticelli to Isabella d'Este), the reasoning of Gesualdo Bufalino on 'The Triumph of Death' in Palermo, and John Berger's deviations from historical document. Di Marco avoids the tyranny of the document, playing between emotional and historical data to create fictional volutes. The book becomes a diary, conflicting with historical objectivity, and includes dialect as a community language. Di Marco reflects on the stupor of beauty, where fiction loses its connotation of lies and becomes a stimulus to think art. She rewrites canonical works like Botticelli's 'Calunnia' (itself from Lucian of Samosata's ekphrasis of Apelles) and connects to Antonello Gagini's altar, the 'Spasimo di Sicilia' by Raphael (1517, now at Museo del Prado), and Giacomo Serpotta's Judith statue. The book transforms art into a filter of sensations, making material signs of the past a connection with absence.