De Humana Mensura: Karshan Comes to Rome

Venue: Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome

Date: 17 December 2025 – 19 January 2026

The sixteenth-century halls of the Palazzo della Cancelleria hosted De Humana Mensura, Linda Karshan’s first exhibition in the Italian capital, staged in the closing weeks of the Jubilee Year of Hope. Curated by Laura Villani, the show brought together, for the first time, a selection of Karshan’s works drawn from Italian and international collections, gathered to restore a dialogue the artist has long carried on with the Renaissance: with Leonardo and Michelangelo, with Plato and Alberti, with an idea of harmony that moves across centuries rather than settling into any one of them.

Few venues could make that argument more persuasively than the Cancelleria itself. Built in the late fifteenth century, with a courtyard attributed to Bramante and a piano nobile frescoed by Vasari in a famous hundred days in 1546, the palazzo is one of the Renaissance’s most complete surviving statements in stone. To install Karshan’s works on paper within it was to let two expressions of the same proportional thinking, four centuries apart, address each other directly.

The show opened on 17 December with a Walked Drawing, a site-specific performance conceived for the Sala Vasari. Under Vasari’s mannerist frescoes, Karshan traced an invisible drawing with her own body — footsteps becoming line, breath marking rhythm, the same choreographic method behind her works on paper, now filling the volume of a Renaissance state room. Reviewers present described a folding of time in the room, as if the geometry in the walls and the geometry being drawn by a living body had briefly become one thing.

The inauguration gathered voices from across Karshan’s Roman reception: His Excellency Marco Salvi, Bishop of Civita Castellana, spoke on the Renaissance between Piero della Francesca’s perspective and Leonardo’s geometry; Laura Villani introduced what she called an elective affinity between the artist and the palazzo; and Giulia Martina Weston — who curated The Universe on Paper at the Domus Comeliana in 2022 — spoke on the humanism running through Karshan’s practice. Villani then interviewed Karshan on her performative method, in which each mark corresponds to breath, to the counter-clockwise turn of the paper, and to a musical counting of time rooted in Plato’s numerical ordering of the cosmos.

Karshan introduced the exhibition with a thought from Italo Calvino’s Norton Lectures — that a single life can hold the breadth of an encyclopaedia — a fitting frame for a show built from decades of drawings, scattered across two continents, reassembled briefly under one Roman roof. It sits comfortably with ACLA’s own conviction: that a body of work, patiently accumulated over a lifetime, can be endlessly reordered, each configuration revealing a different facet of the same underlying order — and that Rome remains one of the truest places to test that idea against stone.