The concert hall was once the room in which the noble Bertacchi family, owners of the building before Bruno Cordati, received their guests. The palazzo was known as the “Grand Duke’s red house”, and in fact Grand Duke Leopold probably stayed here when he came to see the performances at the Teatro dei Differenti.
Today it hosts rehearsals and it is used as a classroom and practice room during the courses held at Casa Cordati every year. The paintings on the wall adjacent to the stairs are just as Cordati himself arranged them. He also chose the colour of the walls, and even the apparent “mistakes” -- such as the new cotto tiles patching up the old flooring -- were his “work” and his taste.
To be precise, when Cordati was alive the room contained many more paintings. They were even hanging between the windows and behind the doors. One can still imagine what its atmosphere must have been like by looking at the original wall. Its sight inspired Marisa Volpi’s following words: “human history coagulates into an epic of the anonymity of suffering, in a series of oils on canvas arranged in precise sequences by the artist himself, in the palazzo where he lived, worked and meditated. In isolation this painter burns of his own flame; the beautiful gold and silver glazing of his previous paintings solidifies, creating these mysterious graffiti, visions revealing Michelangelo-like Pietàs and tales of humiliation and injury.”
The paintings on this original wall must be seen as a whole, almost as the modern installation of an artist of the past, with the old woman holding her hands in that characteristic posture, the children, the people waving, the characters all looking at us viewers.