From 14 May 2021 until 6 January 2022 the rooms of Villa Bernasconi will host the exhibition “Visions of the lake from Villa Bernasconi”; the collaboration with the Civic Art Gallery of Palazzo Volpi di Como is renewed with the loan of a selection of six paintings from the first and second half of the nineteenth century with a lake theme and a representation, treasures from the museum deposits normally not visible to the public: five views del lago, including a lovely oil on canvas with Cernobbio seen from the port, and the work “The story of the castaway” attributed to the Italian painter and patriot Gerolamo Induno.

The first two works, View of the port of Cernobbio and Como seen from Sant'Agostino, by an unknown author and both dated 1804, are two faithful shots of the landscape portrayed where the landscape takes on a leading role while the human presence shrinks almost relegated to a contour dimension of the surrounding environment: on the shore of the port of Cernobbio a few and tiny human figures alternate, dominated by the representation of nature (trees, mountains, the sky) and buildings; likewise in the view of the city of Como from the Borgo di Sant'Agostino, taken from the shore of the washerwomen.

The three works attributed to the painter Maria Teresa Mariani (View of Menaggio, 1874, Como seen from S. Agostino, 1875, Castello di Brivio, 1882) also fit into the trend of landscape painting; with La Bloom (1890), Agnese Mylius - an artist specialized in the representation of flowers - while adopting a formal pictorial language, proves to be up-to-date on the innovations that naturalism had introduced in painting in the last decades of the century.

With the Tale of the castaway, placed in the second half of the 19th century, Girolamo Induno proposes one of the recurring themes in his painting: the genre scene set in poor and modest interiors, set in simple life, set in the humblest strata of the population, characterized by a didactic interest in details, as well as a genuinely dramatic streak typical of the artist, but also derived from the influence of Romanticism and Francesco Hayez.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Como and Lecco Chamber of Commerce.