Fino to 10 January 2021, Palazzo delle Paure in Lecco continues its investigation into XNUMXth century Italian art, with an exhibition that traces the history and instances of the Scapigliatura, a cultural movement born and developed in Italy in the second half of the XNUMXth century.
The exhibition, curated by Simona Bartolena, produced and created by ViDi – Visit Different, in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecco and the Lecco Museum System, presents 80 works, including paintings and sculptures from public museums and private collections, of its major exponents, such as Tranquillo Cremona, Daniele Ranzoni, Giuseppe Grandi and their followers, to explore the many aspects of a new trend that was born in literature to express itself in other disciplines as well.
The itinerary that develops inside the rooms of the building on the Lecco lakefront, divided into sections that investigate the different moments and the different personalities that characterized the Scapigliatura, offers a moment of reflection on the origins of the pictorial movement, with works by Giovanni Carnovali known as il Piccio, by Federico Faruffini and the other "fathers" of the new style, and a gloss dedicated to the important legacy of the disheveled experience, which paved the way for the search for future pointillists, such as for example Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Giovanni Segantini.
The review proposes an all-round story of the Scapigliatura that starts from the visual arts and arrives at other forms of expression, in a complex and evocative game of cross-references, in a close dialogue, in which the macabre and dark themes of literature accompany, sometimes in sensitive contrast, the light and flowery tones of the painting and the thematic realism of the sculpture, leading the visitors into the tormented and unstable climate of a movement, born and raised between Milan and Turin but with international attitudes.
The exhibition offers focus on the role that the Scapigliatura had in the cultural development of the Como area, both in the Lecco area around the figures of Antonio Ghislanzoni and Amilcare Ponchielli, and in the Como area where Villa Pisani-Dossi stands, owned by the writer Carlo Dossi ( 1849-1910), protagonist of the literary Scapigliatura, and designed by the painter, engraver and architect Luigi Conconi (1852-1917), also present in the exhibition with numerous works.
The Scapigliatura developed between Lombardy and Piedmont, in an Italy that had just been unified and was already undergoing profound change, writers, artists and musicians, united by the common desire to open up to European models and to lead a nonconformist existence, bring their anti-bourgeois battle and bohemian, tinged with strong contradictions.
Observed today, the Scapigliatura reveals an extraordinary modernity, assuming a profoundly current value: in addition to presenting itself, in subversive attitudes, as a prelude to the twentieth-century avant-gardes, it amply anticipates the existential attitudes and expressive choices of the contemporary age.
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