In the heart of Milan’s city center, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana — among illuminated manuscripts and relics of Renaissance thought — something unexpected emerges. From May 8 to November 4, 2025, Jago — the sculptor who shapes the contemporary era with the hands of a classic — presents his new work: Natura Morta. Not just an exhibition, but a true visual and conceptual short circuit.

Curated by Maria Teresa Benedetti, the installation openly dialogues with Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, an absolute icon of the Ambrosiana collection — which we had already discussed here on the occasion of a special event. But while the 17th-century painter offered us ripe, sensual fruits already on the verge of decay, Jago takes that language and disintegrates it. Instead of pears, figs, and grapes, his basket is full of weapons. Pistols, rifles, machine guns. Fruits of a humanity that no longer cultivates the earth, but fear.

«The fruit of our time is no longer life, but destruction», says Jago. This is a sculpture that weighs — literally. It is marble. It is flesh turned to stone, a gesture sculpted to last longer than our outrage. Marble, indeed: a classical, eternal, noble material. But here, it does not exalt divinities or mythologies. It speaks of today. Of the wars we scroll past. Of objects built to kill, replicated endlessly and emptied of meaning. And yet still capable of causing harm.

Jago is no stranger to this tension: his works have inhabited squares, deserts, bridges, and humanitarian ships. But at the Ambrosiana, something different happens. Natura Morta is a mirror placed before another mirror: Caravaggio on one side, Jago on the other. Two still lifes. Two distant eras. The same question: what remains of life, when man consumes it?

If Caravaggio’s fruit decayed over time, Jago’s weapons seem already born dead. And in this void of meaning, a space opens for deep reflection on fragility. The real kind. The kind you don’t see in museums, but feel in the streets — between real conflicts and inner wars.