On Saturday, October 26, 2024, the evocative Chiesa dei Servi hosted the inauguration of the Gateway to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art exhibition. Organised by Lucca Comics & Games the exhibition will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the famous role-playing game that has profoundly influenced pop culture. This unique exhibition, curated by Jon Peterson, game historian and author of Dungeons & Dragons – Art & Arcana and The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977, and by Jessica Lee Patterson, art historian for the Koder collection since 2022, represents an unmissable opportunity for art fans and collectors.
Gateway to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art – The largest Dungeons & Dragons exhibition ever created, will offer visitors the opportunity to admire for the first time the prestigious Koder Collection, a collection of over one hundred works of art and memorabilia related to the D&D universe. Among these, there are masterpieces by some of the greatest artists who have contributed to shaping the visual imagery of the game, such as Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson, Brom and Todd Lockwood. The exhibition will also include a selection of original and iconic artwork from from Dungeon & Dragon’s 1st edition to the present day, as well as the first variant cover ever created for a D&D handbook, signed by John Blanche for the English edition distributed in the United Kingdom by Games Workshop.
Alongside the main exhibition, the Uffizi Galleries are contributing to the fiftieth anniversary celebrations with the display of three centuries-old engravings depicting the mythological figure of the dragon, an iconic symbol in both the history of art and the world of fantasy. These are works by artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Cornelis Cort with Saint George and the Dragon (1577), Salvator Rosa with Jason Putting the Dragon to Sleep (1663-1664), and Giovanni Battista D’Angolo, known as del Moro, with Landscape with Saint Theodore and the Dragon (1560-70). The “Dragons of the Uffizi” will be exhibited in the Church of the Servi itself, creating an evocative dialogue between classical and pop art, between myth and role-playing game.
Simone Verde, director of the Uffizi Galleries, commented: “The dragon is perhaps the most famous and beloved of fantastic creatures, to the point of having, already in ancient times, migrated from the original Chinese mythology to the collective imaginations of all the peoples of the world. In the context of the exhibition of the three beautiful engravings that see it as the protagonist at Lucca Comics & Games, it takes on the symbolic meaning of the cosmopolitan journey of the image, of art, and of the pervasive energy of popular culture, which has always known no borders. Not only that. It is through this initiative, in fact, that the Galleries strengthen the fruitful cultural alliance implemented in recent years with the event: just in these days we have renewed our collaboration agreement for another two years”.
“The relationship with the Uffizi Galleries continues and deepens” – states Emanuele Vietina, director of Lucca Comics & Games “over the years we have brought the self-portraits of the masters of comics to the largest collection of self-portraits in the world and this will continue. Today these three precious loans, which introduce the exhibition and marry perfectly with the works of the Koder Collection dedicated to fantasy imagery, confirm the affinities between the art that was popular and ‘consumed’ in the past and today’s languages. Tradition is updated to continue to pass on, this is the spirit of our collaboration“.
The Gateway to Adventure: 50 Years of D&D Art exhibition and the works of the “Dragons of the Uffizi” will be visible to the public starting on Saturday 26 October. The event is part of the collaboration between the Uffizi Galleries and Lucca Comics & Games, recently renewed for another two years, enriching the “Comics in the Museums” project with a new chapter capable of uniting classical art with the world of gaming and fantasy imagery.
