The 50th anniversary of the Asian Art Museum gets an Italian touch with Matteo Ricci’s exhibition

The celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco got an Italian touch: while the museum’s current home was designed by architect Gae Aulenti, the museum is hosting an exhibition regarding the Italian Jesuit Missionary Matteo Ricci, curated – among others – by Italian exhibition designer Marco Centin.

The connection between Italy and San Francisco has been very strong for long time, however the contribution given by architect and designer Gae Aulenti is even more relevant, as the Asian Art Museum was the only American building she worked for. She travelled and worked around the world before she got involved in the project to convert the San Francisco Main Library, located in the Civic Center, into the Asian Art Museum in 2003. Opened in 1966, the museum is today home to 6,000 years of art and culture with over 18,000 paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics that inspire connections across time and place. Converting a library into a museum “meant radically changing the attitude of the users of the place”, Gae Aulenti said once.

Gae Aulenti was born in Palazzolo dello Stello, near Udine, in 1927, she got a degree in architecture in Milan in 1954. As she said once in an interview for the New York Times, she studied architecture “in defiance of her parents’ hope that she would become a nice society girl.” She was one of the two women among 20 graduated at the Polytechnic School of Architecture in Milan.

From the past to the present, the Asian Art Museum opened a special exhibition on March 3rd, during the celebration of the 50th Solid Gold Party: part of the “China at the Center” project, the “RARE RICCI AND VERBIEST WORLD MAPS” exhibition is a trip back to 500 years ago, when the globe started being mapped. In particular, the 1602 Ricci map, developed by Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci while in China, is considered the earliest known Chinese map to depict the Americas. The Italian got an important role in the history of cartography as he was the first European allowed to entry in the Forbidden City of Beijing, the Imperial Palace: he became an adviser to the Ming Court and shared his knowledge of cartography and astronomy. We talked to Marco Centin, who has been working as exhibition designer at the Asian Art Museum since 2012 and has also been part of the “China at the Center” project.

For someone like me, with a fascination for maps, working on an exhibition such as “China at the Center” represented a unique treat. For the first time, two rare maps are exhibited together and we have an opportunity to see up-close the world as it was envisioned by the two Jesuit missionaries, Matteo Ricci and Ferdinand Verbiest, who designed them. If you come to see the maps, follow the profile of Northern Africa and find the Italian peninsula floating in the upper left corner, since both maps are centered on the Asian continent.

You will be surprised to find only a few facts about Italy, two volcanoes in Sicily and a timid note about the Pope in Rome in the Ricci map. Ferdinand Verbiest is even more succinct, only mentioning the tarantula spider in 1,500 plus years of Italian cultural history. Reading the notes dispersed throughout the prints, it’s evident that the maps were intended not just to present facts about the world but also to inspire a sense of awe in the viewer. Minute exotic aspects of many countries, both real and imaginary, some of them deeply rooted in the biases of the time, seem carefully chosen to illustrate one point: our planet is rich, interesting and diverse, populated by strange animals, people and customs.

The world is represented in both maps in all of its unimaginable diversity, and viewers are encouraged to explore it and appreciate its complexity both in its details and as a whole, in one single glance. In the exhibition the presence of the digital maps amplifies this message. On the large touch screen we can gaze and scroll throughout the entire map or dive into its most minute detail with ease, like we were looking through the telescope of a 16th Century explorer. In designing the exhibition, I was hoping to distract the visitors’ attention from the objects, a series of woodblock prints on paper scrolls, and focus it on their content in order to experience, for a moment, the same emotion they were originally intended to offer, a sense of wonder.

CHINA AT THE CENTER: RARE RICCI AND VERBIEST WORLD MAPS can be visited at the Asian Art Museum (200 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102) from March 4 to May 8, 2016.