In 1968, Lina Bo Bardi created one of the most revolutionary installations in twentieth-century museography. In the upper room of MASP, the Brazilian museum she created together with her husband Pietro Bardi, the works saturate the space without a predefined hierarchy; the visitor can move freely among the large windows on which the paintings are suspended. Everyone can thus create their own path and the collection can thus be viewed not in the usual diachronic order, and often with an almost teleological sense, but in a free and random way. The great stage machine also reflects the construction of the collection itself: all the works are on the same level because they all arrived almost at the same time in São Paulo; for the visitor everything is new and the art created on this side of the ocean must perhaps be stripped of all its superstructures and seen with new eyes. At the same time, you can look at a work from the fifteenth century with one from the nineteenth century, cross the Italian school with the Flemish one, go so far as to confuse Raphael and Perugino. \n Perhaps mixing artists and styles in a light and unconscious way, freeing themselves from a certain notionism, gives works the opportunity to return to producing meanings. The Mona Lisa by Gelitin is certainly the result of this creative freedom. The big bulging nose, which forces us to want to look at it more from the side than from the front, brings to mind the profile portraits of Urbino; the plasticine and its bright colors are more reminiscent of the paintings of the early Renaissance in Urbino. Leonardesco's faithful adherence to the subject and dimensions of the work and, above all, his fetishistic obsession with the original remains. The copy of a work comes to terms with the idea we have of it; redesigning is first of all entering into dialogue with the original and rereading its ultimate meanings. Redoing is an interpretative act; formal equivalences go hand in hand with choices that seem arbitrary or incomplete to us, but which turn out to be the only way to transform those ancient signs into modern ones.
