The portraits in the grid above are taken from the Quattrocento frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and others, which line the walls of the Sistine Chapel below Michelangelo's ceiling.
The curators, Alessandra Mauro and Micol Forti, asked me to compare the Cinquecento work of Michelangelo with the Quattrocento work of the Florentine painters. At first I was baffled as to what they meant, but eventually I came up with an idea. The men in the Quattrocento portraits are meant to refer to civic humanism and good government, the ideals of the Florentine Renaissance, while the women are depicted as ephemeral visions of feminine grace. The flattened imagery in the grid refers back to Giotto and the Medieval, in contrast to the contorted, emotional figures of Michelangelo that prefigure the Mannerism and the Baroque.
The curators were challenged to install the exhibition without changing any of the rooms in the beautiful Palazzo Reale, so instead they changed the lighting to a dramatic chiaroscuro, which created a spectacular effect and made my c-prints look like they were in a lightbox.