Verso la modernità [ENG]

A childhood reality and imagination populated by women nourished the art and existential reflections of Massimo Campigli, pseudonym of Max Ihlenfeld, throughout his life. Campigli discovered the passion and practice of painting after his move to Paris, but it was during a trip to Rome in 1928 that the painter was dazzled by Etruscan art. The artist thus found his signature style: dry painting recalling the fresco, with female figures closed in an icy temporal distance like distant divinities from a mysterious past.There is also room for figurative “classical” experimentation in the research of Lucio Fontana, the artist known for his revolutionary “cuts” in the canvas, who found his ideal medium in ceramics. Starting from 1937 the artist used this material to shape swift, vibrant volumes of creases and reflections. Captured in situations and moments of privacy or meditation, his models, too, seem like timeless divinities, made up of a material steeped in light, whimsical and, as it was defined, “Baroque”.In Italian art of the 1920s and 1930s the modernisation of the artistic languages also entered commercial art and advertising graphics. One of the masters of the affiche was Marcello Dudovich of Trieste, who in his dynamic and very elegant female figures interpreted the moods, trends and boldness of a generation of women yearning for emancipation. At the wheel of a sports car, on skis or on the beach, Dudovich’s women show the way of change and a possible alternative to the mother-wife model of the regime’s propaganda. The Florentine Alberto Magnelli’s Seated Woman is also independent and modern, boldly dressed in red. He moved to Paris and was in touch with the most advanced points of European art. In the 1920s Magnelli moved between abstraction and figuration, working with fields of intense, saturated colour that, in this case, shape the figure, solidly positioning her in a rarefied space.The exhibition finishes here. Banca D’Italia thanks you for visiting the “Verso la Modernità” exhibition, curated by Ilaria Sgarbozza and Anna Villari. See you soon!

The last two sections of the exhibition are housed in the council chamber: the most representative room in the building, which preserves its 19th-century atmosphere intact. It now hosts the meetings of the Consiglio di Reggenza, in charge of the administration of the Banca d’Italia’s Florence branch. While the goddess Flora seems to scatter her flowers from the ceiling into the space below, the passage through the room is watched over by a fifteenth-century Virgin and Child placed above the fireplace. Made of polychrome stucco, it is attributable to the workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti.Felice Casorati’s cold, suspended atmospheres, along with his intellectual rigour, propose a modernity far from the changeability of the Impressionists and the dynamism of the Futurists. In his Clelia the Piedmont artist eliminated every residual descriptive or literary element in favour of the purest abstraction. Similar solutions distinguish the study for “Daphne at Pavarolo”, in which the hilly landscape is reflected in the window panes with designed and simplified, almost Cubist, forms, and the female figure becomes a universal emblem of solitude and introspection.Casorati opened the Scuola Libera di Pittura in 1927, in the rarefied, elitist atmosphere of a big apartment owned by the entrepreneur and collector Riccardo Gualino in Via Galliari, Turin. The prerequisite for admission to the courses was total dedication to the practice of art.Numerous girls accepted the challenge. The twenty-five-year-old Florentine Marisa Mori was mainly taught drawing. The Nude Study, possibly a self-portrait, is the result of the work of those days: a material painting made with a restricted range of colours and the figure arranged in a “neutral” space.The representation of the female nude returns in the double painting by Nella Marchesini, Casorati’s first pupil. On the recto there is a foreshortened figure, which alludes to Mantegna’s famous Dead Christ, exhibited at the Brera, and is distinguished by its expert deployment of light and shade within a solidly drawn structure. The verso features a woman sitting on the ground, possibly the same model, portrayed in silent solitude.Virgilio Guidi’s Seated Woman is wearing a simple dress, in a minimal domestic setting. Without a face, she is portrayed fixed in a kind of metaphysical intensity, similar to the creatures of Casorati and his talented pupils.

From the fabrics that cover the walls to the decorative details of the ceiling, the colour of the sky dominates in the blue room. Indeed, Venus looks out from a central oval open onto the firmament, holding a dove and surrounded by grotesques inhabited by female figures of mythological inspiration.The goddess introduces us to two artists featured in this part of the exhibition: Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini and Pasquarosa Marcelli.Alongside the official research and the prevailing interest in a return to order, a tendency was defined in the Italian painting of the 1920s and 1930s that, in the wake of the post-Impressionist legacy, focused new attention on depicting private, inner dimensions by means of rapid and vibrant expressive painting. This involved more mature artists but also young artists with their eyes open to Europe, especially France. They also included some female artists for whom painting, often pursued alongside marital and family obligations, was not a pastime but a creative passion and professional engagement.Pasquarosa Marcelli’s painting is clearly recognisable by her original, non-conformist style, in portraits and still-lifes created with free and colourful brushstrokes. She came to Rome from the small Lazio town of Anticoli Corrado and became firstly a muse for artists, then a painter herself, earning critical and public acclaim from 1915.But this section is dedicated in particular to Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini. From a Siena family, a pupil of Giovanni Fattori, she lived in Rome with her husband from 1911. Here she painted objects of everyday life, urban scenes, seascapes, still-lifes and intimate portraits, like that shown here, which is probably of her sister-in-law Rita Cecchi, all with great chromatic and compositional freshness. Each of Leonetta’s works is part of a “theatre of memory”, accompanied by the writing of diaries and “pocket agendas” that show the painter’s attentive, refined sensitivity. Her assiduous participation in exhibitions was followed with interest by critics, such as Carlo Carrà and Roberto Longhi, and although this declined after the 1930s, her creative engagement never wavered, between literature, painting and constant participation in the country’s cultural life.

The second floor of the building was the private residence of the director general of the Banca Nazionale. As on the first floor, here, too, the ceiling of the bright entrance foyer is decorated with false coffers, made by Luigi Samoggia of Bologna.Italian and European artistic research opened up after the Great War with a return to form, to plasticism and volumetry. Many artists, often back from the battlefields, sought the ideal reconstruction of a lost order in classical tradition. Among different leanings, united by the same aspiration to rediscover a lost “Italianism”, artists participated intensely in the critical debate. The main figures in this period, later coming together around movements like Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento, were Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Socrate and the less known Luciano Ricchetti. While in 1940 Ricchetti was still portraying the idea of a femininity all revolving around domestic and maternal concerns, as the regime’s culture required, Soffici and Socrate were exploring less well-known subjects and at first followed the path of a decisive solidification of the image. Soffici’s Water-seller, twentieth-century heir to an ancient rural existence, is monumental and powerful, while Socrate’s The Girl with the Mandolin was hailed at the Rome Quadriennale of 1931, as a “precise and noble”, sober and balanced painting.Other figurative lines opened up during the same years, following a sensitive “psychological” Impressionism of edgy expressiveness. Mario Mafai “bares” the subject, revealing its more intimate and secret dimension. The same occurs in the portrait dedicated to “sweet Lina”, the model Angela Santini, Mafai’s “fatal woman”, confidant and object of desire. The Woman with Closed Eyes by Carlo Levi is also secret and mysterious. His painting moved between poetic expressionism and delicate realism from the 1930s on. Finally, Orfeo Tamburi’s Cecchina, austere in the palette and formal rendering, and defined by a vigorous black sign, has an effect of bitter expressionist power

The three women featured in this part of the exhibition seem elegant, emancipated and fashionable.Baroness Chiarandà, wife of the painter and collector Carlo, at the heart of the Neapolitan cultural scene between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appears smiling and confident in the portrait by Vincenzo Irolli, formally not far from the manner of Antonio Mancini. Standing out against a dark background, the half-figure of the noble lady is presented in various levels of completeness, her bright face accurately focused and her black gown painted with a frayed and lumpy brushstroke.The Swedish model Elin Sundström was probably the inspiring muse for Paolo Troubetskoy, who married her in 1901. The figure in the desk statuette shown here is portrayed in intentionally sketchy, vibrant, foliated forms. She is on horseback, riding side-saddle with both legs on one side, known as the “Amazon-style” thought more appropriate for women, who did not wear trousers. Restricted to members of high society until the end of the nineteenth century, riding gradually made headway in the following century. Indeed, it was only from the 1930s that women could wear more comfortable and safer clothing for this sporting activity.A mysterious naturalist examining a shell is the subject of the third work. The unknown artist, on whom research continues, had mastered the Impressionist and post-Impressionist style. A few brushstrokes give form to an image of rare poetry, caressed by the pinkish light filtered through the cruet. The young woman, painted close-up, lowers her gaze towards the shell she is holding, completely absorbed. At the dawn of the twentieth century the entrance of women into the world of science was imminent, spurred on by the example of Marie Curie, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903.

The next two sections of the exhibition occupy the sumptuous assembly hall, designed to host the Banca Nazionale del Regno d’Italia shareholders’ meetings. It is covered by a wooden ceiling punctuated by twenty-seven coffers decorated with lilies, the city’s emblem, from which hangs a rich chandelier in Murano glass made in 1962.A radical updating of the figurative language, transformed as much in style as in imagery, took place in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The artists furthest from the academic world reconsidered their relationship with nature, immersing themselves in it. This was the moment of painting en plein air and the definitive onset of the high genre portrait, promoted by the ascending middle class.In The Bunch of Jonquils Giuseppe De Nittis worked with a photographic slant, isolating the figure, who is barely sketched in the lower part of the body, in an informal pose seen from behind. He placed her in a two-dimensional space created by the simple juxtaposition of fields of colour, taking up ideas that came to him from Japanese painting, very fashionable in fin de siècle Paris.The female presences of the Turin artist Giacomo Grosso also inhabit the landscape in an informal manner. The small panel depicts them in a moment of everyday life before a sunny landscape. The fashionable clothing and nearby set table place the two young women in a worldly dimension: a conquest for the nineteenth-century middle class and the women of this social stratum.A joyful moment of freedom is depicted rather by Ettore Tito, reflecting on childhood and motherhood away from romantic and realist clichés in a scene on the banks of a lake. The painting conveys a gay and consoling dimension that is very original when placed within the Italian figurative tradition and is largely the key to the painter’s international success.The painting by Pompeo Mariani, an informed interpreter of the belle époque in Lombardy, is more restrained. The portrait of his cousin, Giulia Bianchi, is set in an unspecified corner of the Villa Reale of Monza and painted with full control of the dabs of colour, in an Impressionist manner.

The elegant first floor foyer appears at the top of the staircase with its ceiling decorations by the Bologna ornamentalist Luigi Samoggia. The grisaille technique makes the painted figures seem like sculptures, symbolising science, art and literature.Our visit continues under the gaze of these figures.The domestic context is the preferred place of Macchiaiola portraiture, with the female figure taking a central role.The figures in the Maternity exhibited are Silvestro Lega’s sister-in-law and nephew. It presents a slice of middle-class life with a poignant lyrical intensity. Standing out against a brown background, built up with dense, essential volumes, the two figures are shown conducting an affectionate dialogue by way of composed and delicate gestures and looks. There is no room for accessory elements. Although secular, the scene is laden with sanctity and recalls those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Virgin and Child paintings the artist recognised as examples of a “timeless” formal perfection.Giovanni Fattori’s inspiration was rather a young woman who critics identify as one of the inhabitants or visitors of Marquis Paolo Gentile Farinola’s villa in Casignano, just outside Florence. She is portrayed close-up, in profile against a neutral background. The figure is alive and engaged in its compositional essentiality, attained by the colour matchings and contrasts of light and shade.The two portraits by Francesco Paolo Michetti and Antonio Mancini were also painted in a domestic context and reject a specific setting, though they move away from macchia painting. Both are distinguished by a rapid touch and fluent use of the paint, in line with the international styles in vogue in the last twenty years of the century. While Michetti depicted a country girl from the Abruzzo hinterland with a wild appearance in his Girl in the Sun, Mancini created a portrait of his model, a young, rosy, fashionably dressed girl with a radiant smile.

We move on from the Donatello foyer to the monumental staircase. The spiral staircase, with its 108 stairs, seems to lightly float in space, occupying a stairwell a good twenty-four metres high and brought to life by the light shining from the oval skylight in the ceiling.This space hosts the Black Angel, one of the rare surviving works by the sculptor Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt. Shown for the first time in Paris in 1922, in 1926 it was presented at a solo exhibition in Milan and bought there by Riccardo Gualino, a great enthusiast, like his wife Cesarina, of dance and theatre. Compact and solid, yet at the same time ethereal and dreamlike, the figure was probably inspired by the Les Sylphides ballet, staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909, with music by Chopin. It came into the Banca d’Italia collection in 1933, but its history was slowly lost, until being correctly attributed in 2013. This destiny of long oblivion followed by rediscovery equates the work to its artist. The daughter of a member of parliament and a prominent figure in Polish high society, married to an aristocrat, Maryla moved to Paris after her divorce, where she studied sculpture, took part in important exhibitions and began working with Adrienne Gorska, a well-known designer and sister of the painter Tamara de Lempicka. After moving to Milan in 1924, she frequented Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento group and joined the circle of Giuseppe Toeplitz, a leading figure in Italian and international banking. Maryla created sculptures for cruise ships, then finally moved to New York in 1938, where, between depression and serious economic problems, she died by her own hand in 1947. It is in remembering this long forgotten artist that our exhibition begins: her Black Angel still moves us with its poetic truth and the “mysterious, lyrical and ingenuous spirit” that already enchanted her contemporaries.

After the broad entrance foyer, enhanced by its statue of Cavour by Augusto Rivalta, we go into the Donatello foyer. The vault seems to open up onto an angle of sky, where some cherubs are crowning the Savoy coat of arms. They are surrounded by a triumph of decorations, with leaves, masks and figures of virtue. The hall containing the first section of the exhibition owes its name to the two, nineteenth-century, sandstone lions, by Giovanni Bastianini, evoking one of the symbols of Florence, the Marzocco, originally sculpted by Donatello in 1418. There is also a reproduction of the Pazzi family’s coat of arms, with back-to-back dolphins, which were probably also taken from an original by Donatello.Here we pay tribute to Florence and the woman who more than any other represents its cultural roots: Beatrice.A model of civil and political aspirations, the founding father of the language and the idea of nationhood, Dante was a fundamental point of reference in the nineteenth-century cultural and political panorama. In Tuscany, especially, the poet and his memory are naturally associated with the city of Florence, made capital of the Kingdom in 1865.So we decided to dedicate a small opening section to Dante, and in particular his inspirational muse, with three precious editions of the Divine Comedy open at plates portraying Beatrice, along with a painting by the Florentine Raffaello Sorbi, dated 1863.The first two books, rare, sixteenth-century editions from the ancient book collection in the Banca d’Italia’s Biblioteca Paolo Baffi, are La Comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta diuino, con l’espositione di Christophoro Landino, of 1529, and La Comedia di Dante Aligieri con la nova espositione di Alessandro Vellutello, of 1544. These contain commentaries by two great Renaissance authors, respectively Cristoforo Landino and Alessandro Vellutello. The books are displayed open, at the incipit of the third canto, showing the ascent of Dante and Beatrice to Paradise. The third book, La Commedia di Dante Allighieri annotated by Ugo Foscolo, features images of the main characters, Beatrice of course among them. In Sorbi’s painting Beatrice moves from muse and co-star to gain an exemplary visual and narrative centrality. In a white gown, she is actually the visual and chromatic pivot of the composition, also alluding to the tricolour and the triumph of national unity.

It is 14 May 1865 and the celebrations for the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth are being held in Florence, which had become the capital of the Kingdom of Italy a few months before. This was actually the first big national celebration, dedicated to the poet and “literary” father of united Italy and took place in the presence of King Vittorio Emanuele II. That event also led to the sanctioning of Florence’s role as cultural capital. which it was not to lose even after 1871 with the transfer of the government bodies to Rome. Indeed, over the coming decades the city was enlivened by the Macchiaiola revolution, by the avant-garde ferments of Futurism, by cultural graftings from the city’s resident foreign community and by the rediscovery of craft practices, by then elevated to the level of refined “Arts and Crafts” of British inspiration. So while the city endowed itself with the institutions needed for the life of a modern state - among them the first headquarters of the Banca Nazionale, established in 1859, which in 1893 was to become the Banca d’Italia - the figurative arts recorded this progress, becoming an integral part of it.And so we conceived this exhibition, drawing on the Banca d’Italia’s collection, to offer a cross-section of that founding moment of the diversified Italian culture, through a selection of works from the early 1870s to the middle of the twentieth century, where the female portrait was the dominant genre. From being a model, mainly captured in the domestic and family dimension, woman gradually emerges as the protagonist of fin de siècle middle-class and aristocratic society, then defining a real space of freedom and a new, social, artistic and intellectual role. The exhibition also focuses on five female artists whose works and biographies tell of a model only able to gain full expression in the twentieth century: the professional artist.

Welcome to the Florence branch of the Banca d’Italia. The palazzo was built between 1865 and 1869 to a design by the Neapolitan architect Antonio Cipolla and expresses the new “Italian style”, combining the splendours of the Renaissance of the facade with the emerging Art Nouveau in some interior areas. A bridge between past and present, with Florence at the centre: the new capital of united Italy.The monumental facade on Via dell’Oriuolo presents the swift rhythm of its sculptural and architectural elements in typically grey Serena stone. It gives the impression of an ancient, noble, Florentine palazzo, perfectly integrated into the ancient urban fabric. After passing through the solemn entrance, the interiors are arranged in a series of elegant halls and reception areas, which you can admire and will be presented during our visit.Enjoy it!