Lorenzo Ostuni's Mirror Engravings at Villa Torlonia

A posthumous exhibition at Villa Torlonia's Casino dei Principi in Rome showcases over 40 engraved mirrors by Lorenzo Ostuni (1938–2013), an artist, playwright, poet, and TV producer. Ostuni spent the last 30 years of his career incising mirrors with a diamond-tipped drill, creating over 300 works. The show, titled after his studio 'La Caverna di Platone' (Plato's Cave) on Via degli Scipioni, features mirrors inscribed with astrological, alchemical, and esoteric symbols. Ostuni's technique challenged the fragility of glass, producing reflective surfaces marked by glyphs, mythological allegories, and faces. His studio was a meeting place for figures like Fellini, Albertazzi, Angelopoulos, and Gassman. Fellini prompted Ostuni's mirror work by quoting the Tao Te Ching: 'The Tao is that which mirrors itself while mirroring the other.' The exhibition is introduced by a catalog preface from Claudio Strinati, who called Ostuni 'a Renaissance man of the 20th century.'