The new exhibition at the Mastio della Cittadella in Turin is dedicated to the artistic revolution of the Macchiaioli.
Ninety works by 30 predominantly Italian artists, including Fattori, Cabianca, Signorini, De Tivoli and Boldini, and some works by French painters such as Troyon, Rousseau, Daubigny, Dupré, Millet and Corot, retrace the history of the Italian "anti-academic" movement which preceded Impressionism and gave birth to modern painting.
The exhibition "The Macchiaioli and plein air painting between France and Italy", from 3 February to 1 April, tells the story of the evolution of Macchiaioli painting between Tuscany, Campania, Piedmont and France.
These are pictorial works, in oils and watercolours, coming from private collections and from the Palazzo Foresti collection in Carpi.
Divided into 10 themes, it proposes a path that tells the evolution of the Macchia movement in the European and Italian context, its relationships with the realism of plein air painting of the French Barbizon school, those with the landscape painters of the Neapolitan school and the relationships with the Rivara School, in Piedmont, where the Royal House of Savoy encouraged landscape painting.
There is also space for the art of caricature to which the young artists of the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence dedicated themselves, the first literary café in the Tuscan city, born in the midst of the Risorgimento in 1848. The exhibition itinerary gives the opportunity to admire various caricatural works, such as those of Telemaco Signorini, Angiolo Tricca, Eugenio Cecconi and Vito D'Ancona and concludes with a theme dedicated to the legacy of the Macchiaioli.
"The exhibition tells the story of the Macchiaioli from a different point of view than usual, because it focuses on the birth of plein air painting and the comparison with France, not with the Impressionists, who followed the Macchiaioli, but with the Barbizon school which, instead, was the common root between Macchiaioli and Impressionists, but also the reality that gave the Macchiaioli the certainty of being on the right path in the research on life that changed the art of the 19th century", explains the curator Simona Bartolena , art historian.
"The works are all little seen and little visible because they are kept in private homes, but they represent the most sincere, most instinctive and truest stain, the one that highlights very well what the Macchiaioli wanted to say with their research".
Produced by the Navigare company, with the patronage of the Piedmont Region and the City of Turin and the collaboration of Aics, the exhibition is hosted in the structure entrusted to Difesa Servizi, the subsidiary of the Ministry of Defense which deals with the valorisation of the assets of the dicastery, including such as the military museum heritage.
It can be visited until April 1st.
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