An adventurous discovery, an extraordinary figurative lexicon, a mythical place like Nero’s palace, a new suspended walkway by Stefano Boeri: 5 ingredients for a memorable event, the Raphael and the Domus Aurea exhibition, opening soon. The pages of the catalogue reveal the exceptional story of the rediscovery of ancient paintings buried in the caves of Nero’s original Domus Aurea and their interpretation by the great painter. The story begins around 1480, when some painters, among the first Pinturicchio, Filippino Lippi and Signorelli, descended by torchlight into the cavities in the Oppian Hill – called grottoes – to admire the pictorial decorations, ever since termed “grotesques”, in the ancient interiors of the Roman palace. In the middle years of the 1510s, however, it was Raphael himself who fully understood the logic of the decorative systems of Nero’s residence and organically reproduced them with his profound antiquarian skills in numerous masterpieces mentioned in this exhibition, starting with the Stanze Vaticane.

This extraordinary invention unfolded in the hands of the genius of Urbino through the centuries to come, until the twentieth century, from the discovery to Raphael’s invention, the spread of grotesques in Italy and Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and their interpretation with the same dreamlike features by the Surrealists.