Umbracula e i Due Savi di Fausto Melotti

The XXI Triennale 2016 filled Milan with design, art and architecture. Among the trees in the gardens, to the left of the entrance to the Palazzo della Triennale, in the heart of the exhibition, the Commission for Fine Arts and Landscapes has erected a small pavilion, a fret-worked shell which plays with light and shade, Umbracula, inspired by the intertwined shoots and branches of the Sala della Asse by Leonardo in the Castello Sforzesco. It has been called "architecture of the shadows."

The author of the book Antonella Ranaldi (the Commissioner for Archeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for Milan) has exhibited two Sages of Greece by Fausto Melotti in the pavilion, and with Fulvio Irace, she has proposed the After in the theme of the additions to the existent in the architecture. The Sages are the two focus points of the pavilion in the shape of an ellipse designed by Attilio Stocchi, in a space that take the form of a pergola; a display, presided over by the two Sages, of the modern herms of the wisdoms of antiquity, marked by Italo Lupi's Totem.

The Sages maintain a dispute on the After, which is the theme of the XXI Triennale 2016 - design after design - on the becoming of architecture. They rise up majestically, in the multiple counterpoint of the pilaster-totem, in a prismatic shape which recalls the Costante uomo in plaster by Fausto Melotti, a prototype of the Sages in the Triennale from 1936 and 1940. Their debate on architecture and contemporaneity continues.