The star of the Baptistery. The monuments speak for themselves... because they are there by Leonello Tarabella.
At Giardino La Nunziatina presentation of the book dedicated to the architectural genius of Deotisalvi.
On Thursday 15 September, at 6 p.m., La Nunziatina Garden in Pisa will host the presentation of the book published by Edizioni ETS, "La stella del Battistero" (The Star of the Baptistery) by Leonello Tarabella. A meeting dedicated to Deotisalvi, the architect who, better than anyone else, was able to transfer into his works the greatness of the Maritime Republic of Pisa, concealing in the hidden geometry of its monuments an unknown and wonderful universe. For the occasion, Carlo Raffaelli, Communications Expert, and Architect Alessandro Baldassari will be present together with the author.
The text, dedicated to the reconstruction of the artistic evolution of Deotisalvi, the famous 12th-century Pisan architect, is composed of two parts that refer to each other: the novel, which proposes a hypothetical path of Deotisalvi's 'geometric' thought and the design phases of his monuments, and the technical part that reports the results of the research on the acoustics and geometry of the Baptistery (and the entire Piazza) promoted in the 1990s by the late Monsignor Silvano Burgalassi.
In fact, it was the words "monuments speak for themselves... because they are there", often uttered by Burgalassi, to whom the book is dedicated, that suggested to the author the narrative path that puts the Chapel of Sant'Agata, the Church of San Sepolcro and the Baptistery in succession, as moments in the great architect's artistic evolution.
The novel, placed temporally in the first half of the 12th century, is the fruit of a dream-like vision that imagines and sketches Deotisalvi's personality: a simple and profound soul who knows how to speak as much with sailors, innkeepers and caravaners as with the notables of his city; a creative mind that sees the harmony of forms in everything with the eyes of a geometer.
Leonello Tarabella, starting in the 1970s, was part of the team of Pietro Grossi, a pioneer of Computer Music in Italy at the CNUCE/CNR in Pisa, later continuing his work as a computer science researcher. He was a lecturer on the Computer Music Informatics Course at the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Pisa.
In collaboration with Esther Lamneck of NewYork University and the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Pisa, he organised several editions of the Summer Music Program in Italy in the 1990s as part of the summer event Strada Facendo.
On the occasion of the centenary of G. Marconi's first telegraphic radio transmission across the Atlantic, he was awarded the 2002 Marconi Prize for Technological Art. With Lucrezia de Domizio, curator of the work of Joseph Beuys, he has been present at many Contemporary Art events such as the Venice Biennale.
After thorough research on the acoustics of the Baptistery of Pisa, he realised the concert SiderisVOX, which considers the Pisan monument as a 'musical instrument' excited by computer-generated synthetic sounds (June 2006 and June 2016).
