Luigi Serafini: Madcappery and Genius

Luigi Serafini is one of the artists whose work features most prominently in the Franco Maria Ricci collection. Included, for example, is the full set of plates of the Codex Seraphinianus – that brightly colored and intricately detailed portrayal of a world entirely invented and floridly narrated by the artist in an asemic script of his own design. Italo Calvino described the Codex as “the encyclopedia of a visionary,” noting also: “Let me say that there are three images most likely to trigger Serafini’s visionary rapture: skeleton, egg, and rainbow.” To celebrate the tenth anniversary of its inauguration, Franco Maria Ricci’s Masone Labyrinth is devoting a spring 2025 exhibition to Luigi Serafini, retracing the origins of that fantastical dream – a journey backward to its source, from the renowned Serafini to the person that is Luigi. The hunt for real-world inspirations, imaginatively and deliriously transformed in the Codex, has turned up a tangled web of references, allusions, knowing and ironic quotations, mental trapdoors, jokes, flashes of insight, poker-faced amnesias, sidelong glances, and sly winks – the labyrinthine map of a world of madcap genius.