Tuesday 15 October 2019 inaugurates a new stage of PTM ANDATA E RITORNO at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, the project of the Brescia Musei Foundation which kicked off last April with the work of Pietro Vannucci, alias Perugino, the Presentation at the temple, and which transforms the "departures" connected to loan requests into "arrivals" of guest works: an opportunity to welcome masterpieces in the rooms of the new Pinacoteca that interact with the permanent collection, giving the opportunity to Brescians and tourists to constantly reinterpret the corpus from the collection of the Pinacoteca.

The second stage of PTM A / R will have as protagonists a work from the civic collections: the statue of Giovanni Franceschetti, Carolina Lera Brozzoni as Flora, which will find space in the XXI room of the Pinacoteca in the absence of the Bust of Eleonora d'Este by Antonio Canova, loaned to the GAM Gallery of Modern Art in Milan for the Canova exhibition.

Waiting for the third stage of the route, which will be held next December, the public will be able to admire Flora until 24 February 2020.

The work of the second appointment with PTM ANADTA E RITORNO - curated by Roberta D'Adda, curator of the Brescia Museums Foundation, together with the contributions of Bernardo Falconi, art historian who carried out the research on Niobe, and Alessio Costarelli, historian of art that carried out the research on Flora - represent a variation compared to the first edition of the project as it does not come from another museum, but from the deposits in which all the works that do not have a stable location in the usual visit path are kept . Both now experience a new light, thanks also to private contributions: the statue of Franceschetti, chosen by virtue of its beauty and its representativeness, has been restored thanks to the contribution collected by the Association of former Executives of the Banca Lombarda e Piemontese Group - which we recall has supported last year the restoration of Luigi Ferrari's Laocoonte.

Carolina Lera Brozzoni as Flora was commissioned to Franceschetti from Brescia (then not even thirty years old) by Camillo Brozzoni, the collector and patron whose memory is repeatedly recalled in the rooms of the Pinacoteca : in fact, he is responsible for the remarkable and rich collection of decorative arts from which most of the precious objects exhibited in the museum windows come from, starting with Venetian glass, as well as some works of ancient art such as the Portrait of a Lateran canon by Sofonisba Anguissola.

Like the Eleonora d'Este, this Flora too is a powerful homage to classical sculpture and the ideal of beauty and feminine virtues. In this case, however, the celebrated woman is not a muse of the past, but the collector's wife, Carolina Lera. And the ideal dimension of reference is not that of poetry, but that of nature or, more precisely, of botany: an interest that united Brozzoni and his wife, and which in sculpture is recalled by the choice of presenting the woman as the goddess Flora, identification strengthened by the presence of the crown of flowers and the camellia. The work therefore allows us to broaden the reflection on this interesting figure of collector to the scientific part of his collections and, in particular, to the large park he had created at his villa in Borghetto, near Porta San Nazaro (now via Corsica). . The villa and the garden - with the greenhouses and the collection of rare plants and camellias - were also part of the legacy with which Brozzoni left his artistic collections to the city. In 1907 the garden was closed, starting a process that led to the declaration of building land in the 1970s, definitively canceling its original character. Through the symbolic presence of this Flora, the link with a lost part of the nineteenth-century Brescia culture is ideally re-established.