Memories of Antiquity in twentieth-century art - Palazzo Pitti

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories of Antiquity
in twentieth-century art

Firenze, The Pitti Palace

Museo degli Argenti

14 march ��" 12 july 2009

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Curated by: Ornella Casazza and Riccardo Gennaioli

The art of antiquity reflected in twentieth-century and present-day art. Paintings and sculptures that have passed through the centuries (from the Etruscans to the Classical Age, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance), and proposed in comparisons with Picasso and Dali, Modigliani and De Chirico, Soffici and Severini, Morandini and Carrà, Marino Marini and Vangi, Mitoraj and Theimer, Guadagnucci and Franco Angeli.
The more than 130 works on show include a series of very significant parallels of the applied arts: between the glass manufactures by Ercole Barovier and Carlo Scarpa and the extraordinary pieces from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the ceramics by Giò Ponti and those from the National Archaeological Museums of Florence and Rome, twentieth-century jewels and several wonders from antiquity and the Medici collections in the Pitti Palace.
The exhibition thus intends to visually represent and communicate the innovative force, revolutionary impact and great expressiveness of twentieth-century art, juxtaposed with an historical Neoclassicism by now deprived of content. It is a return to the origins of our history in search of universal aesthetic tokens, meanings that have never lost the value of immanence in our lives, and thus make it possible to recover canons, measures, modules, and lessons capable of dominating our everyday existence even today.
Already present in Picasso’s works from the early XX century (the exhibition presents the Repas frugal from the Victoria and Albert Museum of London), the return to the origins became a creative drive also for a generation of Italian artists. After the disruptive experiences of the turn of the century, Carrà, Severini, Soffici, De Chirico, Morandi, and Modigliani indeed chose this road to reconnect with roots and traditions (by the way, the exhibition presents Modigliani’s Head of a Woman, a calcareous stone dated 1912 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).
Works by Arturo Martini will constantly “dialogue” with Etruscan sculpture, presenting a genuine identification with these works with their essential features and rough surfaces, in the example of the Chimera from the Alberto della Ragione Collection; while Marino Marini, with the large bronze Pomona from the Uffizi, will express compact, solid and, at times, archaic forms.
Even foreign artists were influenced by the allure of our past: in the Birth of Liquid Desires dated 1931-32, and on loan from the Guggenheim Museum of Venice, Salvador Dalì presents a surreal atmosphere and literally cites the famous Cornelian with Apollo, Marsias and Olympus, which once belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent.

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