For the first time in Bologna within the splendid setting of Palazzo Pallavicini in Via San Felice, from 22 October 2020 to 14 February 2021 over 40 monumental works that cover the entire artistic career of Vittorio Corcos (Livorno, 1859 - Florence , 1933).

The exhibition "Vittorio Corcos Portraits and Dreams" curated by Prof. Carlo Sisi and organized by Pallavicini srl of Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni and Rubens Fogacci, is divided into six sections that tell of the presence of the Livorno painter within the cultural context Oigurative from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first thirty years of the following century.

Considered an innovator in the field of realistic portraiture, a pupil of Domenico Morelli and friend of De Nittis whose Parisian salon he was a regular visitor, Corcos is one of the most appreciated interpreters of the feelings and customs of the Belle époque. The most beautiful known women of the time are the undisputed protagonists of the artist's portraits, characterized by the delicacy of the stroke, by the almost photographic minuteness in the representation of luxurious objects and fabrics but also by the psychological depth of the looks that gives the subjects a mysterious magnetism . For this reason the women painted by Corcos were deoinite creatures that have in them something of the ghost and of the best.

The universe of aristocratic and high bourgeois femininity finds a perfect representation in the precious portrait dedicated to the soprano and film actress Oica Lina Cavalieri - which Gabriele D'Annunzio considered "the greatest testimony of Venus on earth" - present among the works exhibited at Palazzo Pallavicini.

His production is also enriched with landscapes immersed in the light of the Livorno coast that reveal his closeness to the poetics of naturalism and genre painting, but his fame remains linked to female figures and his most intriguing and chatted representation of a woman from thoughtful and introverted gaze, considered by the critics of the time to be too explicit for the bold and unconventional pose. This is the painting entitled Dreams which, following the great attention of the public and critics, was immediately acquired by the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.