This exhibition explored how religious images were used by two individuals separated by a century: Isabella Stewart Gardner, the founder of this museum, and the contemporary Italian artist Luigi Ontani.

Gardner bought a great deal of religious sculpture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In some galleries, she fashioned devotional ensembles, but in other places her arrangements are more whimsical. The museum contains Christian chapels that were used for services (she was a devout Episcopalian) and at one time there was a Buddhist shrine. Provocatively, she placed her own portrait amidst religious objects.

Luigi Ontani has also taken traditional religious images as a starting point for his work. And like Mrs. Gardner, he includes references to himself in his work. Ontani’s responses and reenactments of religious sculpture are daring and playful. Both Ontani and Gardner construct highly personal responses to religious art

There is no nostalgia in my work. I don’t believe in time machines or living in the present. Mask and costume are very important in the global village.—Luigi Ontani

Learn more about the artist

Artist Bio

Many of today’s artists unsettle the principle of personal identity. Since the late 1960s Luigi Ontani has been transforming himself through art, playing endlessly with his masculine and feminine sides, and exploring hybrid identities nurtured by diverse historical, literary, and religious sources.

In the photographs and sculptures in this exhibition, Ontani delightfully engages with the past via religious narrative, ritual, and art—all combined with his personal fantasies using word play and humor.

In the multi-shaped universe created by Ontani, his body and individuality function as core reference, although his body splinters into a multitude of characters, symbols, and images. He creates a web of connections and projects a new model of subjectivity and self-awareness.

Luigi Ontani was an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum in 2007. He lives and works in Rome and Riola di Vergato, Italy and has shown extensively around the world.