From 18 December to 18 March 2020
Andrea Appiani. Drawings is part of the PTM Andata e Return program that sees the "departures" connected to loan requests transformed into "arrivals" of guest works: an opportunity to welcome masterpieces that interact with the permanent collection, giving the opportunity to Brescians and tourists to constantly reinterpret the corpus of the Pinacoteca collection.
In this case the guest works do not come from another museum, but from the Drawings and Prints Department of the Civic Museums of Brescia, whose collections cannot be exhibited continuously for conservation reasons. In the absence of the sculptures by Thorvaldsen and Gaspare Landi's Ebe, on loan to the exhibition by Canova and Thorvaldsen. The birth of modern sculpture at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, the XX room of the Pinacoteca will host these drawings for a few months, which will then be placed side by side with the two paintings by Appiani, the Toeletta di Giunone and the Madonna in adoration of the Child, which constitute part of the permanent museum itinerary.
"The drawings, which in Appiani's production played the dual role of an investigative tool for the construction of pictorial works and a means for the composition of a repertoire of figurative models, reusable over time, reveal great freedom of expression" - recalls the President of Fondazione Brescia Musei Francesca Bazoli - "the same re-interpretative freedom of the marvelous rooms dedicated to the neoclassical period, which after a few weeks from the extraordinary exhibition of Basiletti's Niobe we bring to life with creativity in a continuous process of cultural semiosis"
The large number of works referring to the artist that appear today in the Brescia collections goes back almost entirely to the collection of the count who, endowed with a classicist taste and a keen interest in contemporary artistic manifestations, acquired a significant group of paintings, drawings and engravings, which document the different stages of the painter's stylistic maturation.
"We are already on the fourth project of the great" illustrated history "of Brescia iconography that we present with the innovative PTM Andata e Return format: after the one-off episodes dedicated to Perugino, Basiletti and Franceschetti, we dedicate ourselves to Andrea Appiani" - recalls the director of Fondazione Brescia Musei Stefano Karadjov - "nicknamed by his contemporaries" Painter of Grace ", an artist very dear to Paolo Tosio. The flourishing of this format testifies to the vitality of our Pinacoteca which on average every 2 months offers new intriguing paths of study for the public of citizens and tourists ".
For the occasion, the Brescia Museums Foundation has also produced and published a celebratory poster with an illustrative text of the repertoire exhibited by Roberta D'Adda, Coordinator of the Foundation's Collections and Research Sector, with the contribution of Giulia Paletti.
Within the artist's extensive graphic production , a nucleus of drawings depicting specifically female subjects is clearly outlined, some of which will be exhibited in the halls of the Pinacoteca for this stage of PTM A / R and whose formal characteristics were well summarized already from the artist's first biographer, Giuseppe Beretta (1848): “female faces are celestial, inexpressible; they kidnap with a charm of sweetness; they have a breath of life, a spirit that seems to act ”.
The five studies of female heads correspond to different moments within Appiani's articulated creative process, but they are all characterized by attention to light. The use of three colors (pencil, white chalk and sanguine) appears to be a functional technical choice for achieving the effects of lightness and fusion that the artist sought above all in the rendering of the complexions.
Via Martinengo da Barco, 1, Brescia, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
wednesday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
thursday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
friday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
saturday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
sunday | 10:00 - 18:00 | 17:15 |
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