pinned.events

From today until May 17, MuVIM presents a journey through episodes from Ludovico Ariosto’s "Orlando Furioso". In the museum’s Sala Alta, a selection of ten illustrations by Adrián Alva links universal literature with local history through a careful visual reading of a work that had a profound impact on Renaissance literature and Western culture. The exhibition offers a reflection on honor, desire, and identity, while evoking the streets of a city that once stood at the heart of the Mediterranean. Alva’s work also portrays Orlando’s transformation, the noble knight driven mad by love for Angelica, alongside the stories of warrior women such as Bradamante and other mythic figures. His approach belongs to an illustrative tradition that treats historical styles not as anachronistic errors, but as a critical method. In his interpretation of canto XXVIII of "Orlando Furioso", iconographic scholarship becomes a sophisticated visual system in which Modernism, the Vienna Secession, and Japanese printmaking are not mere stylistic references, but the deeper grammar used to rework an episode that was little illustrated in the past. The images are built around a surface conceived as a field of decorative forces, where line, pattern, and rhythmic motifs carry as much narrative weight as the action itself. Japanese printmaking also serves here as a third foundation, not only through flat composition and the use of cut-out silhouettes, but through the idea that every element in the image—an animal, a plant, or an apparently minor object—contributes its own poetic charge. As a result, each work can be read both as a whole and in detail.