ROVIGO - Renoir looks to Rubens, De Chirico looks to Renoir.
The interplay of canvases that spans three centuries explains how the French master was able to go beyond the season of Impressionism which had seen him among the protagonists.
With the trip to Italy that began in October 1881, the painter from Limoges came into close contact with the classics of art - Titian and Carpaccio, whom he had already met at the Louvre - discovering Tiepolo in Venice, passing through Florence and Rome where he was struck by the Raphael's frescoes in Villa Farnesina, Naples and Capri with Pompeian painting, up to Palermo.
After this Grand Tour of his, made at the age of 40 to seek new stimuli and paths, his gaze turned to the giants of the past, to Rubens and the masters of the Italian Renaissance, elaborating a ''modern classicism''
which inspired from 1910 to the period between the two wars many artists, especially Italians, oriented towards the call to order as a reaction to the fury of the avant-gardes.
The exhibition which in Rovigo until 25 June brings together 47 of his works, including paintings, drawings and engravings, granted by Italian and foreign museums and private collections, therefore focuses on another Renoir, juxtaposing them with as many which include the masters from whom learned, Ingres in particular, and authors of the next generation.
'' His goal does not change compared to the Impressionist period, the attention to nature and light, but the modality changes - observes Paolo Bolpagni, the curator -.
This mature phase does not show a decadent painter but the forerunner of a new, more modern sensibility, a forerunner''.
And to him who is inspired,
openly declaring it, Giorgio De Chirico when he had his ''return to the craft'' starting in the 1920s.
It is precisely the canvas Arianna a Naxos, which the master of metaphysical painting painted in 1932, juxtaposed with the Nymphs by Rubens of 1622, in front of the sensual Bather drying herself which the French painted in 1912-1914, to suggest the key to understanding the entire exhibition of Palazzo Roverella, his eye fixed on the past and the influence on those who came after him.
''Renoir, the dawn of a new classicism'' opens with two impressionist masterpieces, Le moulin de la Galette from 1875 and the sinuous figure Apres le bain from 1878, followed by paintings by contemporary ''italiens de Paris'', Boldini, Zandomenighi, De Nittis and two Medardo Rossos.
The two sculptures of women follow, the classical bronze by Aristide Maillol from 1940 next to the more material and mysterious girl by Marino Marini from 1938 opposite the 'Little Standing Venus' from 1913 by Renoir which will arrive in the next few days.
Of the trip to Italy as a watershed in the rethinking following the impressionist experience, La Bagnante Bionda stands out, from the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin.
''It is the portrait of Aline Charigot,
the young model who will become his wife - explains Bolpagni -.
Renoir put his hand to this wonderful painting in 1882 immediately after returning home.
But Annine is no longer the beautiful girl, she becomes a Venus goddess with the gulf of Naples behind her, an Italian look that we wanted to underline ''.
The faces of women, the curator points out, no longer express the expression of a fleeting state of mind but the essence of beauty, the element of pure nature.
A change demonstrated by the attention to detail and form in the drawings combined with those of Ingres and in the still lifes for the attempt to ''put light into the painting without necessarily doing it en plein air'', with the luminous brushstroke of the Roses in a vase (1900) next to the Dahlias by De Pisis from 1932. Finally, the page of portraits of Gabrielle, the nanny who until 1914 remained in the family taking care of Jean, who was to become one of the great directors of the twentieth century, and the group of fascinating paintings by Armando Spadini - defined by De Chirico as ''the Renoir of Italy'' -, Carlo Carrà and Bruno Saetti.
In the preface to Cennino Cennini's fourteenth-century Book of Art, Renoir affirms that from Pompeian painting, which so struck him in Naples, up to Corot, there had been a line of continuity in the handing down of techniques and styles that positivism, rationalism and the industrial society had broken and had to be reconnected.
''The artist - remarked Bolpagni - speaks outside his own era, he seeks a link with nature and truth that is both modern and timeless.
He looks to tradition but remains free and innovative.
His is a painting of great solidity that pays no attention to fashions but aspires to what is not ephemeral, to things that remain ''.
The exhibition tells the story of a painter who remained young until the end, constantly absorbed in his search for
always ready to change and move forward despite rheumatoid arthritis preventing him from holding the brush.
'' Fleurs '', flowers, he seems to have said before he died.
But to better represent the spirit are those last words of him, '' I'm beginning to understand something ''.