The works selected for the exhibition "The language of reality. Twenty masterpieces of the Italian nineteenth century” not only do they document, albeit briefly, the heterogeneous panorama of Italian art, from Unification to the first Venetian Biennials; but they also focus on what is its most innovative outcome: the transition from the Academy to Realism. And this through an anthology of masterpieces which, beyond the value of the authors - from Signorini to Favretto, from Lega to Filippo Palazzi, from Mancini to Morbelli, from Segantini to Spadini and many other exponents of the major schools - acquires importance due to the 'innovative stylistic conception which, concretely reflecting the revolutionary spirit of the time, imposes those images as true snapshots of one of the most sincere and genuine moments in our history. A design conceived by looking at highly creative spirits who, expressing themselves with an absolutely new language against the trend, offered the soul of artists and volunteers, thus restoring a personal cultural identity to the town. Paradoxically, Fattori himself, who more than anyone else has made the distinctive and characterizing figure of the military theme, is among the few who have not worn a uniform. Far from the battlefields, his great talent in the exhibition is manifested in Landscape with oxen and peasant, a large canvas of full maturity in which the human figure merges into the quiet and purity of a nature preserved from any urban contamination.
Commissioned at the beginning of the 822s by a Milanese amateur, the painting formed a pen-dant with another of the same size, set in Florence along the Arno embankment. The buyer paid Fattori 6 lire for both, who gave him a regular receipt on 1890 February XNUMX. While the landscape of the Arno is still kept by the client's heirs, the painting of the peasant woman sees the light again after more than a century on the occasion of the exhibition in Cortina; in the new space of the Le Muse Gallery it will thus be possible to appreciate in all its brilliant airiness the explosion of greens and the vigorous stroke of an artist who, despite over sixty years of age, has not in the least lost the enthusiasm of his early days .
On the other hand, the atmosphere of elegant and bourgeois life is evoked by Signorini's Tuscan Villa, an extraordinary image in which the painter manages to create spaces flooded with sun, according to the pure Macchiaioli tradition, capturing the fleeting moment in which the rays invest the building, giving life to effects of vague metaphysical suggestion. The development of the villa in the foreground, the meticulous rendering of the details, as well as the exaltation of the volumes through the glare of the sun, finally, the considerable dimensions of the painting (64×116 cm), lead us to believe that this work too was carried out at the request of a passionate admirer, whose identity has not yet been reconstructed to date.
On the contrary, the stretch in which Borrani set the View of the Arno is easily recognizable, perhaps the greatest achievement to which he has linked his name. The magic of the framing creates a dialogue with Signorini's Villa, confirming that full sharing of heartbeats and intentions that sealed the most fruitful season of the two artists.
If in the Tuscany of the Macchiaioli realism represented the most decisive push towards modernity, from the North to the South of the country the Courbettian creed was followed as a fundamental principle for the elaboration of a national style. And it is in this wake that the other famous works exceptionally gathered in Cortina take their place thanks to which this physiognomy, while perceiving itself in its infinite facets, is restored in the unity of a figurative language of that Italy of which, as Indro Montanelli wrote, we are all children.
Cortina d'Ampezzo, Le Muse 2 Art Gallery
Until January 6 2014
