NURIA MORA
Cantarella

Sala del Foro Romano, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana_Piazza San Sepolcro. Milano
03.04.2026 – 18.04.2026

On the occasion of Milan Art Week and miart 2026, at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana opens Cantarella, a site-specific project by Nuria Mora (Madrid, 1974), conceived for the Hall of the Roman Forum. Curated by Gianluca Ranzi and Elisabetta Mero, with general coordination by Martina Corbetta and the scientific support of Marta Moriarty, the exhibition is a large-scale immersive installation capable of transforming the historic space into a suspended environment, in which painting, architecture, and memory engage in an organic dialogue. Located in the heart of an institution that preserves centuries of art and history, the intervention does not impose itself as a fracture, but as a subtle presence respectful of the context. The project unfolds as a meditation on the grandeur of the feminine, often confined by historical narrative to the purely aesthetic dimension, and explores its symbolic and spiritual depth through a contemporary language.

The title Cantarella recalls the legendary Renaissance poison associated with the Borgia family, traditionally identified as white arsenic, an odorless and tasteless substance capable of acting slowly. Legend has it that the victim, before dying, appeared calm, almost “singing.” This symbolic element becomes a metaphor in the project for the boundary between appearance and truth, beauty and danger, historical narrative and mythical construction. The figure evoked in the exhibition is Lucrezia Borgia, whose letters addressed to her humanist friend Pietro Bembo are preserved in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, along with a lock of her hair in a precious display case created by Alfredo Ravasco in the early 1900s. The image of this legendary woman has been marked over the centuries by suspicion and propaganda linked to the so-called black legend of the Borgias, particularly that of her father, Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI. A cultured and diplomatic woman, capable of exercising a significant political role, Lucrezia has often been reduced to an ambiguous icon of seduction and poison. The project does not intend to rewrite history, but rather to open a space for reflection on the construction of the gaze and the judgment that has accompanied the representation of female power.

Cantarella constructs a new contemporary fairytale, inspired by a popular legend according to which Lucrezia, bathed in golden light, enters the halls of the Ambrosiana on certain nights to comb her hair and read her letters to Pietro Bembo. Nuria Mora offers a poetic tale suspended between myth, memory, and matter, where the real and the imagined coexist. The installation occupies the Hall of the Roman Forum like a single visual architecture. Two large canvases in acrylic, oil, and sand on linen are integrated with murals that engage with the architectural structure, while velvet curtains and textile surfaces introduce an almost liturgical dimension, creating backdrops that both reveal and protect. The light, designed to be soft and grazing, enhances the materiality and contributes to generating an atmosphere of suspension. Three-dimensional elements such as glazed ceramics and carpets expand the painting into space, transforming the environment into an immersive experience. Cantarella thus becomes not the name of a poison, but a contemporary reflection on the body as a locus of projection and judgment, on beauty as a misunderstood language, and on the possibility of the feminine returning as a luminous presence—not to seduce, but to reveal.