Robert Wilson. MotherMichelangelo. Pietà Rondanini
Arvo Pärt. Stabat Mater

Robert Wilson

Born in 1941 in Waco, Texas, Wilson is among the most crucial theatre and visual artists in the world. His works unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music, and text. His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned him acclaim from audiences and critics worldwide.

After studying at the University of Texas and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Wilson founded The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in New York in the mid-1960s, where he developed his first works, including Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974-1975). With Philip Glass, he created the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). Wilson’s artistic collaborators include many writers and musicians such as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jessye Norman, and Anna Calvi. He has also left his mark on masterpieces such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Goethe’s Faust, Homer’s Odyssey, Jean de la Fontaine’s Les Fables, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Sophocles’ Oedipus.

Wilson’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures have been exhibited worldwide in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, and his works are held in private collections and museums around the globe. Wilson has received numerous awards for excellence, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, two Ubu Awards, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1993), and the Olivier Award. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the German Academy of Arts, and received eight honorary doctorates. France named him Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2003) and Officer of the Legion of Honor (2014); Germany awarded him the Cross of the Order of Merit (2014). Robert Wilson suddenly passed away on July 31, 2025. Mother, at the Sforza Castle in Milan, was his last artistic creation.

Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt, born in 1935 in Paide, Estonia, is one of the composers whose creative output has significantly changed the way we understand the very nature of music. In 1976, he created a unique musical language called “tintinnabuli,” which has enchanted a vast audience worldwide and left an indelible mark on all of his creative work to this day. Although there is no composition school that specifically follows Arvo Pärt, much of contemporary music has been influenced by his “tintinnabuli” compositions.

After studying in Heino Eller’s composition class at the Tallinn State Conservatory, he worked as a sound engineer for Estonian Radio. From the late 1960s, Arvo Pärt became an independent composer. Both the avant-garde spirit of Pärt’s early works and the religious aspect of his music in the 1970s led to controversial reviews and clashes with Soviet officials. In 1980, Arvo Pärt and his family were forced to emigrate, first to Vienna and then to Berlin, where they remained for almost 30 years. During this period, his music was performed and recorded by the best orchestras and performers of our time. In 2010, Arvo Pärt returned to Estonia, where he currently resides. His tireless search for his own musical voice led him to a creative crisis that lasted eight years, during which he joined the Orthodox Church and studied Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame School, and classical vocal polyphony.

Robert Wilson and Arvo Pärt reunited for Mother after the creation of the opera Adam’s Passion, created in Tallinn in 2015 for the celebrations of his 85th birthday and later performed in 2018 in Berlin and in 2023 at the Rome Opera House.

Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini – Gariboldi Cast

The practices of cloning works of art have reached a degree of perfection that almost no longer allows a distinction between the original and the copy. Now widespread in museums around the world, these practices meet the need to document the work with the primary goal of preserving its integrity, as no replica, however perfect and indistinguishable, can ever retain that imperceptible but profoundly moving aura that belongs only to the original.

Many copies of Michelangelo’s work have been made over the centuries. But there exists only one extraordinary cast of “good form.” Following the acquisition of Michelangelo’s last Pietà by the Municipality of Milan, the renowned conservator and restorer Cesare Gariboldi was commissioned to create this cast, which he completed in 1953 using the traditional moulding technique with alternating sections of wax and plaster. The Gariboldi cast is nowadays kept in the storage of the Sforza Castle Museum in Milan.