The absolute eye of Massimo Listri rediscovering the origins of the divine at Castellabate and Cava de' Tirreni

Vittorio Sgarbi

Using the same idea of the “absolute pitch” that is generally associated with musical intuition, without doubt we can talk of Massimo Listri’s “absolute eye” that brings the architectural and often sacred spaces in Castellabate and Cava dei Tirreni alive, even in their austere and secular immovability and in their sidereal solitude; towns which are connected by the praiseworthy and saintly work carried out and advocated by Saint Constabilis almost at the dawn of our Christian civilization. Indeed it is known that the Saint, the first builder of the castle from which the town of Castellabate then took its name, matured and developed his renowned humanity, erudition, his vast culture and passionate intellect all within the Abbey, walking through its silent corridors, praying at the foot of the splendidly inlaid marble altar and eating his meals under the great and extraordinarily harmonious refectory vaults. Today, those vaults, marbles and the majestic and austere wooden benches of the council chamber, although inevitably entirely different from those that Saint Constabilis saw because they were mostly made at a later date, all seem to literally come back to life for us, even in their terse, sacred immobility, through the photographs by Massimo Listri.

As we know, Listri is a creator of beauty. He is an indefatigable seeker of harmony and beauty buried dormant beneath the “crust” - often so opulent in additions and contaminations that it is no longer recognisable in its original state and purpose - of what we call reality. It would perhaps be difficult, if not for an “absolute eye” like the one with which Listri is gifted, to even distinguish the hidden, literally sacred harmony of the ancient and bare settings from which the photographer has been able to extract lines, planes, vanishing points, games of formal, secret consonances and harmonies. Since it is in the formal, cultural and spiritual disorder in which modernity has been formed, that our eye is often no longer even trained to recognize secret metrics and hidden consonances, not only among architectural elements, but in the natural landscape itself, as we are all, some more or some less, inevitably reconciled with being governed by chaos and the futile and arbitrary overlapping of elements in the contemporary landscape.

Yet, beneath the chaos of appearances, the mysterious and harmonious vault of God's will still stands. In that will, as a mirror of that will, the ancient buildings have developed and taken shape and resist against the test of time in Castellabate and the nearby villages: the abbey, the cloister, the altar, the refectory, the council chamber, but also the stairs, the halls, the frescoed ceilings of the noble palaces of Castellabate - where Listri has commendably revealed the perfect and adamantine symmetries – with their rich tapestries, frescoes and stuccos that adorn the ceilings. Here then is the photographer, almost as if he were possessed by a sacred fire that drives him, with camera in hand, who reveals the architecture that time had instead ended up hiding from us, to give us back, not only the rich and joyful exteriority of the buildings, good too for a superficial glance, but also, and above all, their deepest soul and essence, their being, that although are the fruit and work of man, are the true connecting point or bridge with what is a mirror of the divine in the world.

In Massimo Listri's photographs, the ample halls, places, stairs, spaces, all solitary, silent and perfectly symmetrical as if they were designed and built in the likeness and perfection of the Creator, return to being what they were and what they were made to be for who entered them at the time of their construction, at the time of the Saint and of the saints: sacred places par excellence, meeting places between the human soul and its divine reflection. Yet again Listri, with his absolute eye and the tranquil and serene calmness of an old oriental philosopher, succeeds in making them once again a connecting point, like a secret passage that unites them until eternity, with what we cannot know except with intuition, faith and piety: the ambiguous and terrible mystery of the divine that reveals itself to the world and for the world.

I admire Massimo Listri for his work that is so lucid yet poetic, incisive yet exhaustive, telling whilst mysterious. Many years ago, more precisely in 2011 when I came to Venice to take up the position of Director of the Civic Museums Foundation, I ascertained that the very rich photographic archives lacked an updated photographic documentation of our museums, the most beautiful palaces in Venice and an extraordinary legacy of the Serenissima.

We certainly have abundant photographic documents that are also historically very relevant. They are recorded on thousands of plates and films that allow us to know the city's immense collec-tions, to retrace the history of the displays that have changed over time, to look at the permanent and temporary exhibitions again which have enriched the centuries-old life of our museums with knowledge and new discoveries. But a harmonious and coherent view of how the architectural monumentalit of our spaces are today, many of which have recently undergone important restoration work, of the beauty of our rooms, the long, airy connecting porteghi, the exhibition itineraries that are always capable of surprising us, the hundreds of furnished rooms where the most beautiful art collections of the city are on show in extraordinary contexts, which revive the memory of the past, of the fine daily living as well as the austerities of power, all this was missing.

What was missing above all was a meticulous eye adept at revealing the soul of places, the density of the light and colour that pervades them in the changing hours of the day, the lightness of that enfilade of rooms that, connected one to another, characterise the perspective suite of rooms of the Correr or the Royal Palace, the majestic grandeur of the places dedicated to the care and defence of the Republic. A cultured and knowledgeable eye imbued with history of art, from the Renaissance to metaphysics, one could say, so wide is Listri's field of interests. At the same time he is capable of making an extremely original synthesis of what is sometimes an excessive proliferation of decoration and architecture in our rooms, he grants pauses and silences to historical fragments perhaps revealed by residual elements of architecture, a plinth, a half column, the majestic nature of a door, the iridescent highlights of a Fortuny drape, a vortex of light that indiscreetly seutles on the toned shapes of a Greek god reborn under Canova's chisel. An unconventional eve that sees what others do not, that recoils from the banality that Venice and its monuments often entice one to photograph, that holds its breath before framing the object and that catches the perfect instance of that mysterious aura which inhabits our rooms.

For our foundation, Massimo Listri has been this eye, generous and unpredictable even in the way he works, in a relationship of great simplicity with space. His secret is largely found in the use of natural light, avoiding complicity with artifices or over-sophis-ticated technology, although in post-production his skilful hand does not disdain from the use of putting into focus or perspective cuts, thereby fully satisfying his desire to create "a work of art within the work of art" through his photographs. With this extraordinary view, hundreds of images have been shot, which finally give us back - thanks to his unmistakable hand - a harmonious idea of the multiplicity and disciplinary complexity that charac-terise our collections and exhibition spaces. It is a restitution of unprecedented views that are capable of surprising who, like us, comes into contact with the museum's rooms every day.

Gabriella Belli

I have often looked at Massimo Listri's photographs. I have studied them, admired them, rejected them, looked at them again and studied them again. In the search of what lies beneath this radiant declaration of perfection. Listri's images are a trap for the eye.

With maximum lustre (nomen omen), the images are not just about their sharpness, their brazen precision of detail or their flaunted quality of natural light that inundates, refracts and makes everything clear. Let's look at these photos again together.

There is an infinite visual stillness: a formal purity that originates from a precise perspective location, from a perfect arrangement of the setting, from a correct layout of the area from where Listri observes and from the intensity of a rapid glance that startles one (and it is no coincidence that this little phrase in his case, is full of epistemological meanings) and cannot conclude with just the first blink of an eye.

So: it is then that Listri's images force the eye to re-look. To re-exercise the faculty of looking, to enjoy every detail using our eyes and something else envelops this visual experience: the impossibility to stop looking. Perhaps with this, we have arrived at one of the fundamental aspects of Listri's aesthetics.

I have often looked at Massimo Listri's photographs. This should perhaps be the first statement of any critical introduc-tion to his work. Leaf through these incredible images both mentally and physically, and they reveal before us, in this case, the maked, incontrovertible truth and beauty of the most beautiful (and important) Venetian palaces. And you will only now understand that with Listri's gaze, they tell us something, that not only did we not know, but we didn't even suspect that we could know.

These distinguished perspectives: the architecture dictates and Listri embraces them. He never errs as to where to place, to the very millimetre, his shot. For once - finally - we are in-side: inside the photo and inside the architecture; and this dual "inside" is crucial to best appreciate his work. Now lavish in his details. Waste time in the geometric suites, linger on the columns, appreciate the sense of proportion and harmony that these photos evoke. Someone may say to me that they are unemotional exercises of obstinate observation? Objection over-ruled. Because yes, there is the sharpness and rigour of architectural permanence, but above all, there is the warmth in the gaze that finally (and, almost impossibly) sees for the first time.

What does this mean? That in many cases, we really do see things (palaces, rooms, libraries, Wunderkammern) in Lis-tri's photos for the very first time. This is not because he has climinated the visual background "noise" of the obstacles that stand in the way of seeing the object itself, but because it is only through his way of ensnaring reality as it was conceived that we have this rare chance to admire it.

At the heart of the matter: Listri's photos do not concede intrusions but, at the same time, do not lose a shred of their emotion. And they give emotion back to whatever his eye rests upon. Listri is not a photographer but a revealer of "truth", a precise seismograph of what is "real" and it is precisely because these images are so beautiful to appear dreamy that his work does a double somersault to give us something that, more and more, we are not aware we have: the predisposition to wonder.

I have often contemplated the photographs by Massimo Listri. And, as in this case, in this show of architectural, historical and social "prima donnas" in Venice, I rediscovered that stupefied smile of one who has finally grasped the essence of things. That these palaces, these arrangements of objects, secure a small moment of eternity, that Listri undertakes to capture and give us, we small, transient, distracted and confused human beings.

His photographs accompany us inside places where nothing but beauty is offered to us and we are forced to participate.

They are there, Listri is there with them, our guide, our eye, our master of wonder.

Stefano Salis

Milan, June 2022

“If there's one place that is remote from Massimo Listri it is Matera. But Listri is close to everything and as such he is able to present an image of the town unknown to those who have seen it as a place of suffering and distress. The Sassi were here long before another photographer, Mario Cresci, sanctified them with a spiritual dimension full of painful memory. Listri steps outside the chambers of the heart and casts his eye on the buildings, caves, rockface churches and baroque basilicas and bestows on them order and harmony, eliminating pain and privation. Thus Matera, without pictorial rhetoric, appears unique, a corner of paradise for rstless souls who prefer the unruliness of a world so close to nature than the order of a powerful past.”

Massimo Listri, phographer, is also a priner and manager of his art, and moreover a dandy, libertine, picaro, bibliophile, collector and bon vivant. To these qualities and activities must have contributed his contact with people like Franco Maria Ricci and Vittorio Sgarbi, since the foundatios of “FMR”, the most beautiful art magazine in the world, that he launched at the beginning of the 80s. Next to them, even though of the same age of Vittorio, he appeard an an eternal boy, a pupil, in the academic sense, with a smile that physiognomically, today even more, underlines his Etruscan roots. Vittorio himself created for Massimo the distinctive label of a “photographer that never documents but invents beaty”. Be it landscapes, architectures, interiors, or sculptures, if they're famous he let us discover with new emotion; if they're unknown they emanate the magic of an invention. As testified by Matera's views exhibited here or certain corners of the Museum Home Cavallini Sgarbi in Ro Ferrarese, where a tight composition of heterogeneous works, the result of Vittorio's recurrent manipulations, is translated by his lens in a fulgurating Wunderkammer.

 In the great photographic paintings of Massimo Listri the meticulous virtuosity marries happily with a rare and collected poetic value. These two qualities combined, in my opinion, by Massimo Listri one of the most valid and original artists of our time.

What makes his work unique is how he has made interiors look so absolutely vivid, as if they had a secret life of their own that only he knows how to portray. Listri has the extraordinary ability to capture all the small details that make the difference and reveal all the stories that remain hidden behind the surface. Listri's photos transmit an almost deafening silence, as if time had stopped and humans had suddenly disappeared and the only thing reminiscent of them are the interiors they've left behind, the remains of their lives and their passions, their art and their culture.

Loosing oneself in Massimo Listri's images, strong oneiric webs entwine themselves in one's thoughts. Mainly they are dreams, dreams which in any case, contrary to what happens normally when we realise to be dreaming, are inexpungeable from our minds forevermore...

DearListri,

Today, two years after the exhibition put on in his Gallery by the antiques dealer Bacarelli, I saw the more formal show “The Museums of Florence”.

In view of the nature of the Exhibition and the Illustrious Venue in which it is being held, it was to be feared that your work might suffer from the official character of the occasion, contradicting what I had told you about that precious Florentine exhibition.

It is true that most photographs collected nowadayssum up, with various degrees of intensity, our visual culture, sometimes of the most obvious sort, but I am also able to find the quality of absencein these photos, in which you have reduced to the essential the perception of forms, which appear as themselves, with nothing ornamental to facilitate their interpretation.

As is your wont, you continue not to rely on special effects, nor on lights, nor on pretty colours; as is also your wont you censor all additional presences, including humans, which might make your work more engaging, and indeed, among the many exemplary proofs, those that carry most weight are the ones where even the colour yields to the extreme simplification of black and white, to the appeal and the necessity of the sign.The Lorenese Staircase in the Uffizi Gallery, the Ballroom in the Pitti Palace and the Poccianti Staircase, the two Lapidariums at Palazzo Bardini, through to Michelangelo’s work at San Lorenzo and the library by Michelozzo at San Marco all bear witness to this approach.

Design, imagination and representation of projects in the making,not yet destined to become monuments, are revealed and revived in the ancient proportions, in the geometric divisions of surfaces, in the recurrences of solids and voids, in the tactile perception of materials, which recreate spaces in which it would be possible to live, to breathe.

Deserted places, depicted without the strains of artifice, are inhabitable from within; there is nothing captivating about them, which might involve creating any sort of effects, but rather a fundamental realistic evidence where even the air can be perceived according to its different values. This is why your portraits of environments are fixed in a time vacuum, like discoveriesthat are extraneous to the chances and accidents of the historical account.

It is thought that rarely can a craft become an art, and almost never a style. And yet yours strikes me as one such case.

Good luck with your work.

Yours truly

Roberto Coppini

There are a number of present-day Italians who, had they been born at the right time, would certainly have been with Gabriele D'Annunzio at Fiume, the holocaust city that just after the end of World War I aligned against the injustices of the world and the arrogance of the powerful in the name of a beauty that, for its intrinsic harmony, cannot tolerate any defilement of the balance between reason, truth, and grace. This group of present-day Italians, I think, would have included Giuliano Ferrara, Camillo Langone, Vittorio Sgarbi and Massimo Listri (in addition to the author of these lines). What these people have in common is the relish of intellectual provocation, a refined culture and an aesthetic sense conceived as the driving force of history. Obviously, the author of these lines would have been just a good follower, a petty officer of the above-named handful of heroes of beauty: all of them, surely, officers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Camillo Langone, in his book II collezionista di città, defines Massimo Listri as “the most elegant photographer of Italy”. This song of Langone’s love and esteem for Listri was written by the most sophisticated and glamorous pen of Italian and European literary journalism. In the end, Camillo Langone aligns with the greatest Italian photographer who has earned a place of world renown in the art of photography. It is a natural team effort that the above-mentioned small band of heroes of beauty must carry out to defend the “citadel” of intelligence and culture from the aberrations and the disfigurements brought on by the everyday life of today’s world. 

But what is Listri’s photography? A step back: art is the artifice per excellence; painting, sculpture, as well as architecture, going beyond the reality, becoming a version of the real that ripened in the mind and heart of the artist. For this transformation of the real, what becomes beautiful is that which is not there in the objective truth that each of us, in our own minds, believes to be the right one. The traces of men and women, in all the lands of our planet, are a wound to the natural creation; only artistic creation can transform this wound and make a violent alteration of nature poetic. For this reason photography is considered to be a lesser art: documentary, journalistic, naturalistic when it reproduces a rural landscape, a forest, the stones of a river or a sunset over the water. When it photographs people, it becomes a psychological document, perhaps an important document, but limited to reproducing the reality and rarely becoming a work of art. The originality of Massimo Listri’s photography, on the other hand, is that of making beautiful the world of mankind that is often tired and worn out. Through his lens, that which eludes the human eye, the harmony and elegance present in every human construction but often hidden behind the real image, becomes visible and comprehensible even for non-experts of photography. An architecture, a piece of furniture, a bookcase or a table becomes the proof that man is not only the destroyer of the harmony of Creation but also the creator of fabulous works, wrenched from nature and re-constructed in consequence of a historical period, of the tastes, the times, and a way of living inside a house. 

This is why Massimo Listri is considered to be a great photographer of interiors and of architecture: from his photographs one perceives the atmosphere that man is able to give to the things he builds. A garden can be the ideal space for explaining the life choices of an elite. A piece of furniture becomes a manufactured product in which to deposit the idea of the useful and the harmonious. The interior of a home becomes a dream of power or a dream of an elegance and a tranquillity that do not exist on the streets of the world. Like the large photographs published here amply attest, the photography of Massimo Listri transforms the real with an imaginative and creative participation that transcends photography into a true creative art. Listri conceives and carries out the artistic operation as a pure mental elaboration. He engages in a manipulation of the subject being photographed, accentuating the pre-eminence of the mental dimension with respect to the real that he photographs. In this creative act, Massimo Listri also becomes a great conceptual photographer. Because of this ability, Vittorio Sgarbi has defined Listri as “the photographer who invents beauty”. Massimo Listri intervenes, following the photographic shot, in retouches of lighting and of atmospheres that make his dreamy way of photographing the real unequalled. In this mastery, Listri achieves levels of excellence that make him more a sculptor or a painter than a photographer. This is the masterpiece of Listri, who in his craft has developed an artistic path that makes him the comrade-in-arms of that small band of heroes of beauty who, in their various professions, have earned fame and respect in the grey world in which, sadly, we live today.

Dear Listri,

I saw your show again. Everyone knows that you are good, and that you are also elegant, but neither of the two adjectives, being, as they are, relative, do you justice. 

You are an extraordinary scenographer, availing yourself of a quantity of visual materials that you expertly compose, or re-compose, by means of changes, even minimal changes, of perspective or light, of intonationI would say. Though these pictures are destined for a theatre where no actors appear, they never lack the presence of those who have walked onto the stage or who are just about to. This is your craft. 

In this exhibition, however, there is much more, because the whole of your works bear witness, without adjectives, to the quality of absence. It is true that the scenes are usually deserted, but the difference is that here, in these apparitions, no one is expecting anyone. We are at the zero temperature of the “modern”, understood, when it is authentic, in its rigorous purity.

Let me explain. The Castle of Aglié, the Royal Palace of Stockholm, the Castle of Rivoli, the Royal Palace of Caserta, are the highest points of the discourse you propose. 

Conversely, the light cannon at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the octagonal chair at Pierrefond, the lit lantern that appears below the staircase in the Royal Palace of Stockholm, are clues that induce to a different measure, thewaiting. Someone manned the cannon, someone was seated, someone lit the lantern. The immobility is transformed into the motion of the past or future event.

Off the subject, instead, appearthe fabulous Versailles/Manhattan nocturnal version, the Atelier of scandalous (although gratifying) impressionistic memory. 

Obviously, the photographic qualities are not questioned, but the passage to a different scale of values. A difference that is the dividing line between a noble craft and art. Without adjectives, indeed, or capital letters. 

Please accept my greetings and best wishes for your work.

Yours sincerely,

Roberto Coppini

So his gaze began to seek places and symmetries without particular monumental importance. A wall, a room, a geometry, the archtype of which, the root of memory of which, was within him rather than in the external history.