GIUSEPPE PENONE'S UPSIDE DOWN TREE OWNS SPOLETO

Giuseppe Penone's bronze tree stands upside down in Piazza Pianciani, roots pointed at the Umbrian sky, a live sapling planted in the hollow where the crown used to be. The sculpture is called Le foglie delle radici, cast in 2011, and it is doing something unusual for public art this summer: anchoring an entire festival's visual identity while multiplying itself across two more venues in the same small city. That is not a guest appearance. That is a takeover, and it is being underwritten by a fashion foundation rather than a museum board.

Piazza Pianciani Gets the Poster Image

Piazza Pianciani holds the sculpture that the 69th Festival dei Due Mondi chose for its own poster. The thirty foot tall cast bronze work depicts an uprooted tree flipped so its roots face up, filled with soil and planted with living vegetation that keeps growing through the festival's run. Anouk Andrea Boni photographed the installation for the record. Penone has placed versions of this sculpture at Versailles in 2013 and in the Boboli Gardens in Florence the following year, plus a cast at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts; Spoleto is reportedly one of several existing casts, not a one time commission, which matters for anyone tracking where his monumental bronzes actually live.

Two More Addresses, One Fendi Backed Program

Two additional venues carry Penone's name through July 12. Anafora, curated by Saverio Verini at Palazzo Collicola, opened June 27 and places a selection of the artist's sculptures, including an eleven meter bronze tree in the Salone d'Onore, in direct conversation with the piano nobile's windows and proportions. Ephemeris, seven videos showing Penone in the act of making his own work, screens at the Ex Battistero della Manna d'Oro, shot by Giuliano Vaccai. Fondazione Carla Fendi, the fashion house's cultural arm, is the festival's Main Partner and the money behind both interior shows, a reminder that couture houses now fund museum grade programming as routinely as they fund runway sets.

Formal Training Preceded the Root Casts

Giuseppe Penone was born in 1947 in Garessio, a Piedmont village, and graduated from Turin's Accademia Albertina in 1970. He became a central figure of Arte Povera in the late 1960s, casting his own hands and face into tree trunks for the Alpi Marittime works rather than staging the shock gestures associated with the movement's noisier peers. That patience, tracking a single tree's growth over years, over decades, is still the engine behind every bronze root system he casts today. The approach earned him the Praemium Imperiale in 2014 and a presence in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Stedelijk, and Tate.

1,325,000 Dollars Is the Number to Beat

Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips have all handled Penone's work, and his reported auction ceiling sits at 1,325,000 dollars, set by Idee di pietra at Phillips New York in 2015. Gagosian has shown him steadily since at least 2017, in Geneva, Paris, Athens, Hong Kong, and San Francisco, and right now the gallery has him in New York too. The Reflection of Bronze, curated by former Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg, runs at 555 West 24th Street through July 17. That overlap, a Gagosian artist landing simultaneous placements on two continents, is the same play the gallery ran with Sterling Ruby's wedding portrait bronzes in Paris, whose Paris run overlaps Penone's Spoleto dates almost to the week.

Versailles Got One Tree, Spoleto Got a City

Every prior showing of Le foglie delle radici gave one royal garden or one museum lawn a single sculpture and let it work alone. Spoleto is different because Penone now occupies a public square, a Renaissance palazzo, and a former baptistery at once, which functions closer to a small retrospective than a festival cameo, and it is fashion money, not a museum board, financing the interior half of it. The closest recent comparison for public sculpture operating outside a straightforward gallery sale is Christo's posthumous Air Package installation, where scale and civic placement did the work a price tag usually does.

Expect the Spoleto run to push collector interest toward the artist's other extant casts rather than toward a new sale, since none of these three venues has a transaction attached to it. The number that matters here is not a hammer price. It is three: three venues, one Umbrian city, and a thirty foot bronze root system now doing the job a festival poster used to do alone.