The Grand Tour and landscape painting in the Borromeo Domains: from Gaspar Van Wittel to Luigi Ashton” which will remain open for the entire 2015 season, ie until 25 October. The exhibition is curated by Alessandro Morandotti with the collaboration of Fenisia Cennamo, Veronica Drago and Elisabetta Silvello.
The exhibition was also the occasion for an important restoration work commissioned by the Princes. The subject was the group of “Delizie”, or eighteenth-century views of the Domini Borromeo by Francesco Zuccarelli. The recently completed restoration has restored the primitive lightness to the master's seven canvases, works where documentary attention is admirably combined with allegory, according to the taste of the time. For the exhibition, the curator has chosen to present exclusively those that depict the Borromean Domains on Lake Maggiore, in line with the theme of the exhibition.
The definition of "Enchanted Island", referring to Isola Bella, was coined by Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), an Anglican pastor who visited Italy with a very critical eye towards ecclesiastical censorship and absolutist forms of government many Italian states. Burnet was one of the first travelers to pass through Isola Bella, in 1686, ideally inaugurating the season of the inevitable stops on Lake Maggiore for European travelers on the Grand Tour. rock surfaced in that marvel that is Isola Bella, it was still at the beginning but: "when all is finished, this place will look like an Enchanted Island" he predicted.
Since then and until modern times, the flock of travelers, and with them, of the artists who came down to admire Isola Bella and with it the Domains of the Borromean Princes on Lake Maggiore, has become uninterrupted, creating the fame for which the Islands Borromean still enjoy in the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic world in general.
As is the case in the rest of Italy, the travel testimonies correspond to an immediate visual fortune of the Islands, immediately at the center of the interests of modern landscape painting, a second side of the coin to follow the appreciation of the Italian artistic and natural beauties. The exhibition will try to restore this double register of the fortune of the Borromean Islands, comparing figurative documents (paintings, drawings, engravings) and literary testimonies between the end of the XNUMXth and the mid-XNUMXth century.
As evidenced by the subtitle of the exhibition, "From Gaspar Van Wittel to Luigi Ashton", Morandotti and his working group offer a wide range of works and among them there are numerous rediscoveries, of works as well as of artists specialized in the field of landscape painting , rediscoveries that allow us to enrich our knowledge of a chapter of the history of art in northern Italy still much neglected by studies and exhibition opportunities.
The "enchanted Island" had been strategically conceived by Vitaliano VI Borromeo (1620-1690) so that "the house could serve to make friends and esteem", as recalled in a passage from his will, and for this reason it was always open to visits from guests illustrious, for weddings and solemn receptions, as well as for the public 'reviews' of illustrious foreigners who traveled the roads of Italy in the age of the obligatory educational journey of European gentlemen, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Travelers' Island is above all that of spectacular gardens which evoke historical-literary comparisons (between the island of Armida 'sung' by Tasso or the legendary gardens of Queen Semiramide) and sometimes stimulate more imaginative metaphors (to the German Keyssler it seemed one of " those glove boxes shaped like a pyramid in which we usually serve sweets on the table”); the gardens never leave visitors indifferent, even when it comes to criticizing their artificial conception in the years of progressive attention to the landscaped garden. According to usual schemes in travel reports, the testimonies refer to each other, sanctioning reading conventions that become real 'stereotypes'. With the pleasant surprise of verifying that suddenly Milan, thanks to the natural beauties of Isola Bella and Isola Madre, became the city of gardens and water features, as it had never been before, at least in the eyes of travellers.
As a natural appendix to the exhibition, not only the views of the other Borromeo residences on Lake Maggiore (from the Rocca di Angera to the Castelli di Cannero) will be taken into consideration, but also the views of other Lombard properties of the Borromeos (Cesano Maderno, Senago, Peschiera Borromeo ) often born in pendant or in series with works depicting the Islands.
info: www.borromeoturismo.it
