Zoomorphica Temporary Exhibition

A Conversation with Piero della Francesca on Rebirth and Resurrection

 
From May 30 to August 30, 2026, the Sansepolcro Civic Museum will host the new temporary exhibition “Zoomorphica,” sponsored by the Municipality of Sansepolcro and dedicated to a series of ink drawings of the animal world created by artist Arianna Fioratti Loreto. This artist, who works in both Italy and the United States, presents here a series of 75 creatures—some real, some hybrid, and some mythical—through the use of a symbolic language that explores the relationship between nature, symbolism, and the imagination, drawing on Renaissance humanist thought and, in particular, the works of Piero della Francesca.
The exhibition features a vast array of creatures ranging from the largest and most traditional (such as the lion and various birds), through reptiles and insects, to the most microscopic organisms—including radiolarians, zooplankton, and viruses—and even mythological creatures. The scale of the works, along with their rigorous aesthetic quality, allows for a precise depiction of all organisms, in a realm that oscillates between biology and symbolism, where nature hovers between myth and reality.
And it is precisely this otherworldly dimension that characterizes this series of ink drawings, serving as a common thread between Loreto’s work and that of Piero della Francesca—and, in particular, to The Resurrection and its ability to make the invisible visible through the landscape. In fact, the exhibition draws directly on the Renaissance works typically housed in the museum to highlight the connection between life and death, the earthly and the heavenly realms, where the animal world takes on symbolic and spiritual significance.
Indeed, as the artist herself explains, from the very beginning, human beings have been confronted with the visible world of nature and the invisible world of the afterlife; from this perspective, the representation of the former allows us to discover the latter, revealing the supernatural—here symbolized by the creatures the artist has selected and linked to the concept of transformation and rebirth—which express the mystery of the passage between life, death, and a new life.
With this highly topical series of works, the exhibition presents itself as a compendium of the new contemporary perspective that reinterprets, in a modern key, the humanistic thought that characterizes most of the local artistic production and places humanity at the center of a constructive dialogue with nature, thereby allowing access to the great mysteries of life and death.
 

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