Bust of Dedalo belongs to the Ancient Gods series, in which Filippo Tincolini grafts the iconography of the contemporary superhero onto the codes of classical statuary. Daedalus, the master craftsman of Greek myth – the inventor who builds wings to escape the labyrinth – here meets the armour of the modern technological hero: two figures millennia apart, united by the same faith in ingenuity as an instrument of freedom and power.

The bust, carved in white Carrara marble and then painted, draws on the polychromy of ancient Greek sculpture: colour is not decoration but memory, a return to what the marbles were before time bleached them. The worked surfaces and deliberate fractures tell of a relic surfaced from a past that looks surprisingly like our present.

Ph. Laura Veschi