Allegory of Painting and Sculpture (1637), oil on canvas, cm. 114.5 x139 Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

From December 16, 2011 to April 29, 2012 – Palazzo Barberini, Rome
The Special Superintendancy of Historical, Artistic and Ethno-Anthropological Heritage and of the Polo Museale of Rome is inaugurating new exposition areas for temporary exhibitions on the ground floor of Palazzo Barberini, with a grand show dedicated to the genius of Francesco Barbieri, known as ‘il Guercino’ (Squinter), one of the major painters of seventeenth Century Italy. He was born and lived in the city of Cento and was also active in Rome between 1621-1623.
Curated by Rosella Vodret and Fausto Gozzi, the Director of The Municipal Art Gallery of Cento, the exhibition is both a significant tribute to Guercino and an homage to the recently deceased Sir Denis Mahon, who, during his century-long life, dedicated a large part of his studies to the painter.
The exhibition is composed of works from museums and collections in Rome and in Cento, as well as from the Cultural Heritage Fund of the Ministry of the Interior. Held in the renovated section of Palazzo Barberini, the exhibition gives us an opportunity to admire an extraordinary body of paintings that provide an overview of the Emilian master’s work. Thirty-six masterpieces cover the entire history of his long artistic journey, providing an ample display of his exhuberant talent. The exhibition brings the artistic development of the artist to light, from his first paintings that reflect the influence of Ferrarese painters such as Ippolito Scarsella (1551-1620) and Carlo Bononi (1569-1632), up to the works linked to the style and ideas derived from Ludovico Carracci.
Guercino’s precocious talent has often been highlighted. It was an innate ability that was immediately recognized even by the undisputed master of the period, Ludovico Carracci, who was much admired by Guercino himself. Carracci recognized a modern propensity towards new trends in the young artist from Cento, through whose art he relived a kind of continuity of his own. The familiar intense blue of the sky is renewed with an entirely new vigour in Guercino’s work. Certain effects in his representations of thunderstorms had never been achieved previously, and were already evident in the early Mystic wedding of Saint Catherine in the presence of Saint Carlo Borromeo, of 1614-15, and in the later canvas Madonna of Ghiara with St Peter, St Carlo Borromeo, an angel and a donor and in Saint Bernard of Siena and Saint Francis of Assisi with the Madonna of Loreto, both executed in 1618 and held in The Municipal Art Gallery of Cento.
After an intense beginning in his native homeland, between 1621-1623 the artist was called to work in Rome under the patronage of the bolognese pope Gregory XV Ludovisi, and his nephew, cardinal Ludovisi. The decorations of Casino Ludovisi, a building and gardens in the vicinity of the Pincio, were probably the first works executed by Guercino in Rome. Here the artist painted the Aurora on the ceiling of the main room on the ground floor, which has been defined as the most surprising of the many versions of this subject in Italian painting. In the corresponding room on the main floor he produced Fame, Honour and Virtue.
The monumental altar-piece, The Burial of Santa Petronilla, is the absolute masterpiece of his roman period. It is housed today in the Capitoline Gallery and a smaller sized version is present in the exhibition. Mahon rightly underlined the importance of this work as a watershed moment between his youthful and more mature works. It represents a change in style which was clearly due to the importance of the commission, the first of a series for St. Peter’s Basilica, which appeared to have urged the artist to switch to a more classical style.
The sudden death of the pope in 1623 and the realisation that he had lost his principal patron and protector were the main reason for Geurcino’s return to Cento. A reflection of the profound change to a more classical and monumental sensibility in the successive works during his roman period are perceptible in St. Luke and in St. Matthew (National Gallery of Ancient Art) from the Barberini collection, which are part of a series of paintings depicting The Four Evangelists.
After his return to Cento, the painter executed paintings requested by distinguished roman buyers, which are still held today in the papal city, and are ascribable to the period of transition (1623-1634) that followed his return to Emilia. This particular stylistic period is well represented by Return of the Prodigal Son (Borghese Gallery), completed around 1627-1628, and by Portrait of Cardinal Bernardino Spada (Rome, Spada Gallery) completed in 1631.

King Saul tries to kill David with a spear (1646), oil on canvas, cm. 147x200 Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

Guercino’s mature years are characterized by a renewed attention to a more classical manner – particularly after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. This was especially the so with regard to the chromatic spectrum used, which became soft and delicate, and a refined formal elegance and simplicity that brought him to an increased clarity of composition. Expressions of this tendency are seen in Cleopatra before Ottaviano Augusto from the Capitoline Gallery, and the splendid Saul against David, from Palazzo Barberini.

More

Bernardo Bellotto, Veduta di Verona co Castelvecchio e il Ponte Scaligero - oil on canvas

From 26 November 2011 to 9 April 2012 – The Palazzo della Gran Guardia
We all know the Venitian XVIIIth century well, with its Guardi and Canaletto. But what about its counterpart Verona, just a few hundred kilometres away? Of course authors who were active in Venice also left their mark in Verona such as Tiepolo or Bernardo Bellotto. Of course they are represented in the exhibition that nevertheless wishes to bring forward those artists who have been half-forgotten. It is the case of Giambettino Cignaroli who was at the origin of a local academy, and more so, Pietro Antonio Rotari, who was sought by the Tsars in Saint-Petersburg as much as Vernet or Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. In an era in which virtual reconstitutions are common practice, the one that stages the return of the Triumph of Hercules is much awaited: this fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo, that decorated the Palazzo Canossa, returned to dust during the bombing of the Ponte Scaligero bridge, in the night of 24 Apr il 1945.

More in Italian

From October 1, 2011 to February 12 of 2012 – Palazzo Zabarella – Foundation Bano
Frederick Bano announces “The Symbolism in Italy”. The appointment, in many ways not to be missed, this year is in Padua, Palazzo Zabarella.
To make this new venture, the Foundation Bano, here once again with the Antonveneta Foundation, called Fernando Mazzocca and Carlo Sisi Clarelli with Maria Vittoria Marini, director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

The theme and scope are well known: at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, the unconscious breaks through in the art and nothing will ever be the same. It is the discovery of an “other” world, fascinating, intriguing, a new lens that turns the perception of all reality, it is a physical landscape always in motion..
It is the story of a movement that spreads rapidly at European level but not without providing comparisons across borders and in particular with the scope of the Austrian Symbolism: the worth of all Judith – Salome, Gustav Klimt or Sin, the famous masterpiece by Franz von Stuck: two works alone are worth the visit to the exhibition.
But if international comparisons are of the highest quality, that the Italian offer eight sections of this exhibition, is certainly no surprise.
They are works that, taken together, reconstruct the mission of art that fiery debate on these crucial years of social change. Works that evoke that hovered in literary and philosophical Angelo Gabriele D’Annunzio or accounts or in circles devoted to Wagner’s music, while the exposure brought the ferment in Italy of European movements.

Gaetano Previati Maternità, 1890-91 olio su tela, cm 174 x 411 Collezione Banca Popolare di Novara – Gruppo Banco Popolare

Just with one exposure, the Triennale di Brera in 1891, opens the itinerary of the exhibition that has accompanied the two mothers and maternity Segantini Gaetano Previati paintings that mark the synthesis of divisiveness and symbolic content. Below is a section dedicated to ‘players’: the Italian and foreign artists who participated directly in poetic adventure grew up around the Manifesto of 1886 and all of Jean Moreas’ “art of thinking” harbinger of poetic moods.
“A landscape is a state of mind, “wrote Henry-Frederic Amiel, and this principle is inspired by the section, dealing with the nature of feeling panic, which exhibits works prevail, in the representation of landscape, the fog, the glow at night, the atmospheric variability, situations in short more easily connected to psychological disturbances. A preface to this issue the ‘Isle of the Dead Böcklin in the refined and unpublished version of Eight Vermehren, flanked by paintings by Vittore Grubicy, Pellizza from Volpedo, Plinio Nomellini.

The exhibition ends in the ‘Hall of Dreams’, which at the Venice Biennale of 1907 had consecrated the demands and achievements of the Symbolist generation, creating a real setting assigned to the ingenuity of Galileo Chini and decorative artists who, with their militancy, had contributed to the poetics of ‘pleasure’ and concern, and the myth of beauty, spirituality and mood, supporting them with tenacity until the beginning of the revolution whose futuristic introduce two more masterpieces of the symbolist The dream as Umberto Boccioni (Paolo and Francesca) and the mother who sews. (google traduction…)

Museum Hours

Kirchner - Marcella, 1910 - olio su tela, cm 101 x 76 Berlin-Dahlem, Bruecke-Museum

From September 24, 2011 to March 4, 2012 – Ville Manin – Passariano
Curated by Magdalena Moeller and Marco Goldin, the exhibition consists of over one hundred works (paintings and documents) from the Brücke-Museum in Berlin. Organized according to a timeline but also in a series of almost solo shows, from Kirchner to Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Mueller, this is the first exhibition in Italy to provide a detailed account of the development of the movement known as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), a corner stone of Expressionism. To be held in Villa Manin, the exhibition is the third stage in a long-term project entitled Geographies of Europe, conceived and curated by Marco Goldin.
Founded in Dresda in 1905, Die Brücke was a highly original movement that eventually gave rise to what was to be known in art history as “Expressionism” – the German-speaking world’s initial major contribution to modernism. Unlike the previous dominant artistic trends, these artists did not attempt to represent the various aspects of visible reality in their works but rather they strove to express subjective experience and the individual’s innermost feelings.
The artists in Die Brücke aimed to translate objects perceived “directly and with no falsifications” into works of art stripped of any kind of academic conventions.The movement did not have a specific program. What the artists in the group had in common were spontaneity and a creative flair. Their overall ambition was to transfer innovative ideas and non-orthodox attitudes to everyday life so as to smash the claustrophobic mold of strict social rules in the Wilhelminian era.

Seen together, the works in this movement magnificently encapsulate the early days of Expressionism up to the First World War. With their bold palettes and non-conventional stylized imagery, they have a special vitality and ecstatic energy which still fascinates today, as does their powerful subjective exploration of the landscape.
The Expressionism exhibition documents the various forms of artistic creativity in this revolutionary group. Their radical assumptions and visionary concepts became a significant source of inspiration for the following generations of artists. The exhibition documents all the main stylistic stages, also through documents translated from German into Italian for the catalogue, which will include an entry for each work on show and several essays by leading experts.

Museum Hours

Amedeo Modigliani Boy in short pants, c. 1918 Oil on canvas, cm 99,7 x 64,8 Dallas Museum of Art. Dono della Leland Fikes Foundation Inc.

From September 11, 2011 to January 8, 2012 – Palazzo dei Diamanti – Ferrara
“Modernity, that great mystery, dwells everywhere in Paris: you find it again at every street corner, coupled with what once was, pregnant with what will be… Like Athens in the days of Pericles, Paris today is the city par excellence of art and the intellect.” Thus De Chirico wrote in 1925, describing the splendour of the French capital in that unique period known as “the Roaring Twenties.”

Following the Great War and until the early Thirties, Paris was in full swing. Its worldly and liberal cosmopolitan atmosphere, the explosion of jazz, the theatres, cafes, and galleries drew from all of Europe and America the greatest figures in art, culture, music and theatre, giving the city a mood of revival that made it the international testing grounds for creativity. Modern masters, such as Monet, Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Chagall, Duchamp, De Chirico, Miró, Magritte and Dalí are the key figures in a major exhibition by Ferrara Arte that, for the first time in Italy, through a careful selection of works coming from prestigious public and private collections all over the world, tells about this golden period in the City of Light.

In the post war years, two impressionist masters, Renoir and Monet, were still working and influential: the former, drew themes from classical works, like his monumental paintings of the bathers which were admired by Picasso amongst others, while the latter pushed the boundaries of abstractionism in his iridescent paintings inspired by the garden at Giverny.
At the same time, under the name École de Paris, a new generation of non-French artists became established. Talented, free-spirited and restless, young artists such as Modigliani, Chagall, Van Dongen, Foujita and Soutine revitalized the international bohemian atmosphere of the Montparnasse district with their nudes and portraits. Alongside them were the protagonists of the Cubist revolution, who by that time were already famous. Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris signed sophisticated masterpieces which evoked, in their vivacious depiction of glasses, bottles, newspapers and musical instruments, the brilliant worldly climate of the Parisian cafes and salons.

The theatre, music hall and the circus, places emblematic of the “moveable feast” evoked by Hemingway in his memoirs of those years, inspired brilliant interpretations by the artists and photographers who were seduced by these glittering animated worlds. In addition, artists such as Matisse, Larionov, Léger and De Chirico worked on avant garde projects with masters in other creative fields, resulting in works like the productions of the Ballets Russes and the Ballets Suédois which combined music, dance and visual arts into spectacular “total works of art.”

Pablo Picasso Maternity, 1921 Oil on canvas, cm 65,5 x 46,5 Private collection © Succession Picasso, by SIAE 2011

At the same time, and also as a reaction to the traumas of the war, there emerged an aspiration to harmony, peace, and balance. The masterly “maternity” pictures by Picasso, with his multifaceted genius, as well as the powerful nudes by De Chirico and the elegant Pulcinellas by Severini interpreted the modern classicism that prevailed in the Twenties in the name of a new found harmony and fullness of form. In turn, Matisse and Bonnard recovered a naturalistic vein with their sensual nudes bathed in light and posed in interiors and gardens saturated with colour that were a genuine feast for the eyes. It was also in Paris, where he moved in 1919, that the Dutch artist Mondrian created his revolutionary neoplastic compositions of pure colour grids, inspired by the principle of universal order.

Paris in the Twenties was also the scene of some of the most startling and radical artistic provocations of the Twentieth Century. The moral and cultural conventions of bourgeois society were the target at which the Dadaist creations of Picabia, Duchamp, Arp and Man Ray took aim in a spirit that was ironic, rebellious and iconoclastic. The dream of a better world, and at the time, premonitions of another war, were embodied in the paintings and sculptures of Ernst, Miró, Masson, Magritte, Tanguy, Giacometti and Dalí, with their dreamlike and disturbing imagery, like windows opening onto marvels that invite the breaking of all inhibitions and reawaken desires and the imagination.

From 4 June to 27 November 2011 – The Museo Correr – Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
The exhibition presents more than forty works, exploring Julian Schnabel’s career from the 1970s to the present and offering an opportunity to admire paintings and sculptures by a great artist and all-round American phenomenon. The retrospective illustrates his aesthetic, strongly influenced by Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, but also drawing on the European and Mediterranean tradition. His art recalls the style of the old Spanish and Italian masters, like El Greco and Tintoretto, and reworks ancient and modern literary and cultural references from Homer to Aeschylus, to the art of the great masters like Giotto, Goya, Antoni Gaudí and Pablo Picasso.
Painter, sculptor and film director of international fame, Julian Schnabel stands out for his astounding capacity for creative metamorphoses and the arresting expressive power of his works. A painter first and foremost, he has explored various fields of art, including film, as the acclaimed director of Basquiat in 1996, Before Night Falls in 2000 (which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007 (which earned him the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival). Schnabel’s films are closely connected to his art, and his work in film can be viewed as a natural continuation of his painting.
Best known for his plate paintings, Schnabel has in fact used an infinite variety of media and materials to create his works, from velvet to oil cloth, from pieces of wood from all over the world to sails, photographs, rugs, tarpaulins and in general any flat surface that inspires his creative process. This painting process influenced people into making new kinds of art.
Towards the end of the 1980s Schnabel began to work with outsize formats. This approach, although often interpreted by critics as a mere attempt to impress the viewer, actually springs from the artist’s desire to reference the imposing paintings of the past commissioned by the state or the church, as well as the “big paintings” of post-war America.

Museum Hours