Nineteenth Century Italian Art between Hayez and Segantini, Ottocento
San Domenico Museums, Forlì
Gianfranco Brunelli, coordinator of this exhibition, hopes that this exhibit will put a stop to the preconceived notions of the Italian Ottocento, after the hundreds of retrospectives that have featured this or that author, this or that aspect, declination or facet of that important century.
The curators Fernando Mazzocca and Francesco Leone focus on the fateful sixty years between the Unification of Italy and the outbreak of the Great War.
Mazzocca and Leone explain that this period covers everything from the last phase of Romanticism and Purism to Realism, from historicist Eclecticism to Symbolism, from Neo-Renaissance to Divisionism, and proudly present many masterpieces, which, as protagonists of those troubled decades, have yet to be rediscovered.
We are taken on an immersive journey through time and space, meeting outstanding paintings and sculptures that mark new cultural and social aspects of popular impact and universal significance.
The variety of languages with which they were represented allow us to retrace the stylistic experimentation that characterized the course of Italian art in the second half of the nineteenth century and on the threshold of the new century, in an engaging dialectic between tradition and modernity.