Universal Catholic Press Exhibition, Vatican City

Rome

Realized works

I have worked at Court. This is how Ponti described the experience of staging the Universal Exhibition of the Catholic Press in the Vatican. It was Ponti's first work for the Church, the first major Exhibition he was entrusted with, and his first encounter with the Monument. The Monument -the walls of Julius II, Bramante's great niche of the Pigna, Maderna's seventeenth-century fountain, the colonnade of the Chiaramonti wing- was approached, and in places included, with detachment: the ancient surroundings only influenced the scale. The Exhibition was seen as a work of art whose observer is in movement: its means of expression were the routes, the through-views and the counterpoint of light and dark. The Church is what prompted Ponti to say, discussing the exhibition in Domus: severe and pure, as if the exhibition were the house 'of a monastic order', the order of the Catholic Press. The heart of the display was the Salone Maggiore, or Throne Room, with its tapestries designed by Raphael, flooring of white linoleum and red canopies (Ponti red). And then there were the devices that Ponti was to use again later, such as the staircase with the tops of the steps in white marble and their fronts in colored marble -making it white when viewed from above, brightly colored when viewed from below. The sequence of screens like giant written pages, and the perspective with a rising floor. Piacentini said about this exhibition: here there is everything of Ponti, the dreamer and the mathematician.