Italiano
| Events > exhibitions archive > 2005 > Romantici e Macchiaioli | ||||||
 |
||||||
|
Exhibition "The Romantics and the Macchiaioli. Giuseppe Mazzini and great European painting" October 21, 2005 - March 5, 2006 Palazzo Ducale This exhibition presents two of the great schools of nineteenth-century painting, the Romantics and the Macchiaioli, seen through the eyes of an exceptional critic and guide: Giuseppe Mazzini (Genoa 1805 - Pisa 1872). Mazzini was a man of great culture who firmly believed that making Italy into a true nation depended not only on renewing society and individual consciousnesses but also on the cultural unification of the country. He was convinced that art - and especially great painting, which had always been a source of pride and historical identity for Italians - could play a fundamental role in this great design. In his excellent essay on La peinture moderne en Italie, published in London in 1841, Mazzini identified Romanticism as the movement that had successfully expressed the ideals of the century, becoming a national and popular art able to interpret the changes that were bringing about political and social upheaval throughout the world, an art that took it upon itself to voice the aspirations of a people about to occupy centre stage in history. In an original take on the bicentenary of Mazzini's birth, this exhibition shows masterpieces by leading Italian Romanticists such as Canova, Appiani, Hayez, Luigi, Camuccini, Francesco and Giuseppe Sabatelli, Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Pelagio Palagi, Massimo d'Azeglio, Giuseppe Molteni, Giovanni Migliara and many others, highlighting especially the works Mazzini knew and wrote about in such an extraordinary way. The presence of significant paintings by Paul Delaroche and Paul Scheffer gives appropriate emphasis to painters who were very famous at the time throughout Europe and were particularly loved in Italy. The arrangement of the exhibition seeks to underline the connection between Mazzini's thinking and views on art and the works on display. Various paintings by his favourite artists, in particular by Hayez, invoke the outstanding events in the history of mankind which were the expression of a collective spirit; these include the Crusades, Greece's struggle for independence against Turkish oppression and the revolutions that broke out in Paris in 1830 and spread across Europe in 1848. The glorious and dramatic events of the Roman Republic (1848-1849), in which Mazzini and Garibaldi were involved as leading players, are recalled in the two sections that form the central core of the exhibition, with paintings of particular fascination: on the one hand, enormous allegorical canvases that reflect his thoughts about Italy's destiny and mission as a beacon of civilisation in the world; on the other, in an effective counterpoint, small but stunning works by painters such as Gerolamo Induno and Federico Faruffini, who were present as soldiers during those heroic events and who painted moving depictions of Rome devastated by war. The end of that grandiose utopia marks the starting point for the second part of the exhibition - completely different from the first in terms of type of work, content and arrangement. Here on display are paintings by the so-called Macchiaioli, revolutionary painters inspired by democratic and republican Mazzinian principles who sought to lay the groundwork for a new society by creating an absolutely different art. They developed a style of painting that was an alternative to Romanticism, where the message was conveyed not by narrative procedures or melodramatic expedients but by forms and colours – an approach later to be found also in the Impressionists. Masterpieces by Fattori, Signorini, Abbati, Borrani, Cecioni and Lega document the influence of Mazzini's thinking and ideals on artists who have changed our way of seeing. Catalogue Skira, www.skira.net  ISBN: 8876243887 |
|
     |
||||
|
|
|
||||
