Towards Salone del Mobile

There is a question time keeps asking. It evolves with every era, but the core stays the same. Why do we show things? Not because we ignore their value. Quite the opposite. Because we know it too well to keep it hidden. Exhibition begins with excess, not lack. It comes from the urge to make the extraordinary common—bringing into the flow of the city what once lived in the privileged shadow of private ownership. From this tension—between private and public, form and meaning, object and transmission—something took shape in seventeenth-century Rome. Something we would later call the modern exhibition.

San Salvatore in Lauro. The name already holds an image. Laurel. A plant of glory. A symbol of victory and poetic recognition. In this monumental complex, in the heart of Rome, between 1676 and 1720, Giuseppe Ghezzi organized annual exhibitions. He was a painter, served as secretary of the Accademia di San Luca, and was regent of the Virtuosi al Pantheon. Each year, he opened to the public the treasures held in the city’s private painting collections. This was not just logistics. It was an anthropological act. Precise in its intent. It redrew the boundaries of the collective. It mapped a new sense of belonging. 

Works from Rome’s great aristocratic families—the Colonna family, the Barberini family, the Pamphilj family, the Sacchetti family—were removed from exclusive domestic spaces. They were temporarily relocated and placed within the sacred and civic space of a church. The painting left the private room. It entered the collective breath. With this intuition, Ghezzi made art public. He proposed a modern idea of shared culture. He can be considered the first exhibition curator of the modern age.

In late Baroque Rome, a painting by Guido Reni or a landscape by Claude Lorrain hung in a cloister, open to anyone passing through, triggered something sociologically disruptive. The hierarchy of the gaze began to crack. Seeing, once a privilege of patrons and connoisseurs, became open. The beautiful object stopped being private property of taste. For the duration of the exhibition, it became common ground. 

A form of simultaneity emerged. People who did not know each other, who did not share a social order or a lineage, standing in the same space and facing the same object. That was the radical shift—not the painting itself, but the shared presence before it. Giuseppe Ghezzi did not yet know it, but he was inventing the museum, four centuries early—the principle of every major collective urban exhibition.

Now. The present. April 2026. Milan. Each year, around the third week of that same month, the city undergoes a transformation. Not just logistical. Not just traffic. Not just tourism. The public space itself changes. Its semiotic density shifts. Surfaces begin to carry more meaning. Showrooms. Courtyards. Industrial buildings. Foundations. Deconsecrated churches. The city opens what it usually keeps closed. It makes accessible what is normally reserved.

The idea is the same. Structurally. Anthropologically. The same as Ghezzi. Yet its phenomenology is entirely different. The distance between a painting and a contemporary design object is vast. Formally. Materially. Conceptually. But in the structure of the idea—in taking an object out of a private, inaccessible sphere and offering it to a collective gaze—there is continuity. It deserves to be fully examined. What separates the two experiences is the nature of the subject who exhibits. And the public who looks.

In seventeenth-century Rome, exhibition was an act of aristocratic grace. A noble lending his collection to public view performed a gesture of generosity. Not a market act. Beauty was mediated by power, yes. But it still pretended to transcend it. In the contemporary exhibition, the language is that of value—economic, symbolic, and reputational. The vocabulary has changed. And yet, as in San Salvatore in Lauro, exhibition still performs a function beyond transaction. It establishes a canon. It defines an aesthetic standard. It tells the collective: this is what is beautiful. This is what is possible. This is what we can do. The fair is a space where beauty and function are offered to the gaze. Not by grace, but by contract. Still, the ritual structure is the same.

The cloister and the pavilion. Two spatial forms. One underlying logic. Both are spaces of exception. Spaces outside ordinary time. Both suspend the everyday. Places we go to with intention. With a different disposition of the gaze. In both, the object is removed from use. Elevated to contemplation. In both, what matters is not only the work, but also the shared act of seeing. This shared presence. This simultaneity of attention. That is what creates the bond. Not shared identity. Shared attention.

There is, however, a structural difference no analogy can hide. Perhaps the most revealing one. The exhibitions at San Salvatore in Lauro followed the liturgical calendar. The feast of the patron saint. The rhythm of devotion. The exhibition had the character of a sacred event. Suspended time. An interruption of the everyday in the name of something beyond it.

The contemporary exhibition is different. Modernity has sacralized it on its own. No religious order required. The sacred and the profane merge into something harder to name. A collective ritual that serves both community and economy. It produces meaning and revenue. Ceremony and contract at once. Not an impure hybrid. A new form of ritual. One that no longer relies on transcendence to justify collective acts. This ambivalence may be what makes it vital. Irreplaceable. 

What Ghezzi understood—that exhibition responds to a fundamental human need: to see together, to share a common gaze on what we produce, and to measure the present through the quality of what we make—has not faded. Not in the seventeenth century. Not in the nineteenth-century Salons. Not with mechanical reproduction. Not with the digital image. It endures. Because its core is not aesthetic. Not economic. It is anthropological. The need, if only for a moment, to share the experience of something beautiful. 

Matter is never neutral. It brings memory. It brings possibility. It brings the question that for four centuries has not ceased to resound in cloisters and pavilions, aisles and showrooms: what are we capable of giving the world to look at?

Opening image: Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Gallery of Views of Modern Rome, 1754-1757. Via Wikimedia Commons