Preview Salone del Mobile 2025: Robert Wilson lights up the Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini

Workshop di Robert Wilson, Museo Pietà Rondanini, November 2024 © Archivio Change Performing Arts

The famous American artist is the protagonist of the Salone's cultural programme with an installation dedicated to Michelangelo Buonarroti's iconic work 

The 2025 edition of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, scheduled from 8 to 13 April, opens with a project of extraordinary intensity. In the year of Euroluce, Robert Wilson, a master in the creative use of light, has devised a total artwork devoted to Michelangelo’s masterpiece, recognized, together with Leonardo’s Last Supper, as the most iconic artwork in Milan.

With complete respect for the display of the Pietà Rondanini designed in 2015 by Michele De Lucchi at the Ospedale Spagnolo, Wilson will create his own vision of Michelangelo’s work, entitled “Mother”. His version stresses the universal and timeless values of Michelangelo’s masterpiece in dramaturgical dialogue with the “Stabat Mater”, a medieval prayer in the vocal and instrumental version by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

“I intend to create my own vision of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, which remained unfinished at the time of his death, divided between a feeling of reverential awe and one of admiring wonder,” says Robert Wilson. “However, a feeling of serenity, of being at peace with oneself even faced with the tragedy of death, will prevail. Religion doesn’t come into it, in my case. It’s a universal image, a spiritual experience that moves something deeper within ourselves that needs no explanation.”

“Mother”, created especially for the Salone in collaboration with Milan City Council | Culture, at the Pietà Rondanini Museum - Castello Sforzesco, will take the form of a 30-minute sequence of music, lights and images repeated continuously, which the public will be able to attend with admission by reservation at scheduled times. The installation, with live performances of the “Stabat Mater” until 13 April, will be open for visitors until 18 May, offering the city the opportunity to book visits beyond Design Week.

“Robert Wilson sees the stage, a piece of paper, a building, the façade of a cathedral, or a screen as indistinguishable canvases on which to paint light,” explains Franco Laera, curator of the project. “Light for Wilson is not ornament to what we are looking at, it’s what really enables us to see. Light guides our gaze, like yeast to arouse emotion.”

The collaboration with Robert Wilson will see the Salone del Mobile once again alongside La Scala for the opening night of the 63rd edition, with Wilson curating THE NIGHT BEFORE. OBJECT CHAIRS OPERA, with the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, conducted by Michele Spotti.

Robert Wilson is also one of the special guests announced at “The Euroluce International Lighting Forum”: the first edition of a global encounter for a discussion involving many voices on the major issues of lighting design. On 10 and 11 April, the Forum will bring together a panel of experts from different fields, including lighting designers, creatives, architects, scientists and illumination professionals to discuss crucial issues, such as the interaction between light, architecture and well-being.   