Premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, Il Mecenate by Massimiliano Finazzer Flory will be screened on April 30, 2025, at the Italian Cultural Institute.
The documentary breathes new life into Galeazzo Arconati (1580-1649) hailed as the first modern patron of the arts, leading viewers through a vivid tapestry of stories, interviews, and images among the mythological sculptures of Villa Arconati — from Diana and Hercules to labyrinths, wandering satyrs, Phaethon’s fiery chariot, and the tragedy of Laocoön. Against this backdrop, the restoration of the monumental statue of Pompey the Great stands as both an act of preservation and a gesture of cultural resistance.
For Finazzer Flory, “to be a patron means protecting not only works of art but the artists themselves”.
Arconati’s vision, however, goes even further: it asserts the urgent need to safeguard the very places where art is born and transmitted. In this perspective, the collector evolves into a co-creator of an open cultural system — no longer a mere private owner. This philosophy continues today through the work of the Fondazione Augusto Rancilio, a living example of how memory and responsibility can come together to preserve and relaunch beauty.
Through the voices of Pietro Marani, Marco Maria Navoni, Matteo Nucci, and Silvia Romani, the documentary reveals that myth is not mere decoration: it is a living language, educating and weaving together body, faith, and reason. As Finazzer Flory reminds us, allegories and metaphors are vital tools, essential to giving voice to our humanity. From this awareness emerges the idea of a “roots tourism” — a deeper way of experiencing art, beyond mere aesthetic consumption.
Arconati’s gesture — the donation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus to the Ambrosiana Library in 1637 — shines as a turning point not only for Milan but for Europe’s cultural identity. Without it, says the filmmaker, we would know a fragmented Leonardo: “We would have the painter and the scientist, but we would miss the inventor, the profound interpreter of nature and humanity. Without that donation, Leonardo’s vision would have remained incomplete”. Il Mecenate conveys this legacy without resorting to didacticism: the images themselves, calm and powerful, carry the story.
For Finazzer Flory, cinema is a force that transforms images into words and enriches vision with deeper insight, restoring that emotional power without which neither history nor art could come into being.
And cinema, when guided wisely, may be one of the most powerful and democratic forms of cultural mediation. The journey closes with a look towards the future. In an era ruled by technological acceleration and the rise of artificial intelligence, the idea of patronage must reinvent itself.
Finazzer Flory envisions new global patrons — builders of cultural communities without borders:
“Renaissance is not just a historical period; it’s a mindset, renewed each time we challenge the present.
Today, we need new patrons: cultural ministers of borderless communities, capable of raising the banner of beauty as a project of knowledge”. A new kind of patronage, digital and global, yet profoundly human at its core — a movement to nurture more conscious, creative generations. Because culture is not inherited like a sealed object: it is built, breathed, and passed on. Beauty — like memory — is a daily act.
