“In the enclosure of the sanctuary of Nemi grew a tree from which it was not allowed to break any branches. Only a runaway slave, if he succeeded, could break one. In this case he had the right to fight the priest, and if he killed him, he reigned in his place with the title of king of the forest, rex nemorensis”. Thus, in 1911, one of the fathers of ethnology, Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), wrote in the first of the twelve books of his monumental Golden Bough, activating a reflection on the metaphor of the transgressive value of the creative act that has spanned the entire culture of the 20th century. Reasoning on this metaphor, enriching the discourse with the great visual documentation provided by the works of ethnic art in the Brignoni Collection, were the MUSEC team and the master Pier Daniele La Rocca, an artist from Veneto who was also active for many years in Canton Ticino. Pier Daniele La Rocca, like entire generations of Western artists before him, was impressed by the original expressive power of the anonymous masters of the artistic traditions of Borneo, New Guinea and the Melanesian Arc. In the forms of that sculpture, he felt the fullness of an inner accomplishment manifest itself and began to search, within and beyond himself, for the meaning of that astonishing totality; he sought it first in the world of individual emotion and then, bit by bit, also in that endless guide of mythical and religious motifs that is The Golden Bough. On display are 23 large works by master La Rocca and three ‘witnesses’ from the Brignoni Collection, chosen from those that for their anthropological and artistic value have emblematically oriented the development and outcome of the research.