Luigi Spina began photographing the Farnese sculptures at the Archaeological Museum of Naples in 2002. Mythical Diary, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2017, is the book that emerged from that long acquaintance — not an inventory of masterpieces but a photographer’s record of returning to the same marble bodies across days, months and years.
Spina works in black and white and at close range. He separates limbs from the wholes they belong to, letting curves, joins and worn surfaces carry the image. Sculpture is read as flesh: mythological figures made to address a living viewer rather than stand at a safe curatorial distance. Where museum photography usually documents, these pictures converse. Aphrodite, in his handling, is not a stereotype of myth but a gathering point for the desires and imaginings of everyone who has looked at her and dreamed or studied her — the argument the book makes in its own terms.
The organizing device is an imaginary diary of fifteen days. It is a convention, and the book admits as much: the work behind it was accumulative, carried out within one circumscribed place, the museum, dense with other lives and stories. The diary frame nonetheless governs the sequencing, so that images arrive as entries in an encounter rather than as catalogue plates.
Essays accompany the photographs, by Carmela Capaldi of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, the art historian and dealer Philippe Daverio, and Giovanni Fiorentino, who teaches at Tuscia University. Spina, born in Naples in 1966, has published several earlier books with the same house, among them The Buchner Boxes and The Dancers from the Villa dei Papyri, and is listed in the Atlante di Arte Contemporanea a Napoli e Campania, 1966–2016.
For collectors, the object itself matters here: 160 pages at 27.5 × 34 cm, hardcover with jacket, a format that supports the close viewing the photographs require. Its interest lies less in novelty than in duration — a sustained, almost studio-like engagement with a single collection, and a sequence in which looking is treated as a form of diary-keeping.
