MILAN (AP) — German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer pays tribute to one of Milan’s most majestic yet melancholy spaces inside Palazzo Reale with the site-specific exhibition titled “The Women Alchemists,’’ previewed on Tuesday as part of the city’s cultural programming for the 2026 Winter Olympics The artist was inspired by the crumbling caryatids, or sculpted female figures that served as architectural supports, inside the palace’s Sala delle Cariatidi, a ceremonial hall severely damaged in a 1943 Allied bombing during World War II. Kiefer said he was immediately inspired by the room and the fragmented female figures, left as a memorial to the destruction of war. “I quickly came to the idea of the women alchemists, that is, women who were equal with men, who experimented with medicine exactly as men,’’ said Kiefer, 80, one of Germany’s most acclaimed postwar artists known for monumental works that examine history, memory and collective trauma.