From Felice Giani to Luigi Serra
The nineteenth century in the collections of the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation in Bologna

Name: From Felice Giani to Luigi Serra
Start: 2024-03-21 00:00:00
End: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Location: Palazzo Fava - Exhibition Palace

Palazzo Fava - Exhibition Palace

Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

The show

The Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna Foundation, in collaboration with Genus Bononiae, presents to the public for the first time an exhibition with the main works of the nineteenth century in Bologna belonging to its art and history collections.

The exhibition, entitled From Felice Giani to Luigi Serra – The Nineteenth Century in the collections of the Cassa di Risparmio Foundation in Bologna, scheduled at Palazzo Fava. Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 21 March to 30 June, curated by Angelo Mazza, is part of the project Painting in Bologna in the long nineteenth century | 1796 – 1915, initiative promoted by the Bologna Civic Museums Sector | Civic Museum of the Risorgimento which involves fourteen city exhibition venues in outlining a journey through Bolognese painting from the Napoleonic age to the beginning of the Great War.

Structured into 6 thematic sections, it presents around 30 artists and over 100 works, including paintings, drawings, watercolours, sculptures and engravings, to which are added the majolica from the Minghetti factory that belonged to the Duke of Montpensier. These are significant nuclei for focusing the activity of some of the great protagonists of nineteenth-century Bolognese painting, whose creations effectively illustrate the main productions of the time. The visitor will therefore have the opportunity to admire a selection of works by Felice Giani and Pelagio Palagi, by Clemente Albèri and Pietro Fancelli, by Antonio Basoli and Giacomo De Maria up to Luigi Busi, Alessandro Guardassoni, Giovanni Masotti, Luigi Serra and others.

The exhibition begins in the Jason Room on the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Fava, where in the center is the large plaster cast of the Penitent Magdalene (ca. 1806-1813) by Antonio Canova. This first section presents a collection of figure paintings created by artists active in Bologna between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the time of the collapse of the Ancien Régime and trained at the Clementine Academy, up to the works of the decades of the Restoration and the Italy united with the masters linked to the Academy of Fine Arts and the Venturoli College. The large canvas by Gaetano Gandolfi (S. Matteo della Decima 1734 - Bologna 1802), Death of Socrates from 1782 - whose subject is already a harbinger of new times - and the small oil painting The Madonna, the Child and the infant Saint John by Felice Giani (San Sebastiano Curone 1758 - Rome 1823) are works that already record an evident contrast between tradition and modernity. But it is with the portraits of Pietro Fancelli (Bologna 1764 - Pesaro 1850), which intertwine the lesson of the Accademia Clementina with neoclassical modernity, and of Pelagio Palagi (Bologna 1775 - Turin 1860) - whose works with scenes of a historical nature -, that taste begins to escape more easily from the conditioning of eighteenth-century academic culture. Still in the field of portraiture, Clemente Albèri (Bologna 1803-1864), whose various works are on display, is represented by the Portrait of Giuseppe Gaetano Mazzacorati (a prominent figure in the city's cultural, scientific and economic life), balanced between neoclassical and first romantic inflections. Also noteworthy is the work of Alessandro Guardassoni (Bologna 1819-1888), who practiced on the models of seventeenth-century Bolognese painting starting from the masterpieces of Guido Reni, up to the figuration of Luigi Busi (Bologna 1837-1884), with the painting Nicolò de' Lapi before the torture, which thematically fits into the trend of Lombard historical romanticism already started in the 1920s thanks to the Milanese works of Pelagio Palagi and Francesco Hayez. The section ends with the works of Luigi Serra (Bologna 1846-1888), whose apprenticeship is similar to that of Busi and takes place between the Venturoli College and the Academy of Fine Arts, and reaches the early twentieth century with Felice Vezzani (Novellara 1856 - Paris 1930) and Giovanni Masotti (Bologna, 1873-1915), whose Portrait of Alberto Caburazzi as Garibaldi and Preludio are exhibited.