From November 19, 2021 to May 1, 2022, Palazzo Mazzetti in Asti opens its doors to I Macchiaioli. The adventure of modern art: an exhibition that, through a corpus of over 80 works, presents some masterpieces of nineteenth-century Italian art from the stain to naturalism, including famous paintings and lesser-known works because they have never been exhibited before, largely from the most prestigious European private collections.

At Palazzo Mazzetti the exhibition represents a unique opportunity to discover the Macchiaioli, the most important pictorial movement of the Italian Risorgimento avant-garde and the social climate that is the background to the story of these artists, in addition to the themes, contents and characters of this revolutionary movement: you will be able to admire works such as Mother with child (1866-67) by Silvestro Lega, Tramonto in Maremma (1900-05) by Giovanni Fattori, Child in the sun (1869) by Giuseppe De Nittis, next to Alaide Banti on the bench ( 1870-75) by Cristiano Banti, A visit to my studio (1872) by Odoardo Borrani and Signore at the piano (1869) by Giovanni Boldini.

On display, therefore, also works at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that tell how the formal and conceptual conquests of the Macchiaioli were received and developed by subsequent generations of painters.

Works with innovative contents for the time that focus on the expressive power of light, which represent the spearhead of the very rich collections of great patrons of that time, characters of extraordinary interest, united by a passion for painting, entrepreneurs and businessmen in love with beauty, without which we would not have been able to admire these masterpieces today.

Sometimes donated by the authors themselves and more often purchased to support painter friends in difficult moments, these works - able to indulge aesthetic pleasure and enrich the largest collections - have become masterpieces sought after even by the great art connoisseurs of our days.

Designed to compare the works of the "Macchia" (1856-1868) Tuscan naturalism (1865-1900), the exhibition offers a visual narration from the birth to the evolution and to the end of the artistic experience of the Macchiaioli and of their entourage, from 1856 to late 1900s.