FRANCESCO CAUCIG GORIZIANO
1755-1828

Name: FRANCESCO CAUCIG GORIZIANO
Start: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
End: 2024-03-24 00:00:00
Location: Palazzo Coronini Cronberg Foundation

Palazzo Coronini Cronberg Foundation

Gorizia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy

The show

The neoclassical painter Francesco Caucig, professor at the Vienna Academy, is the artist from Gorizia who enjoyed the greatest fame among his contemporaries during the 19th century. Count Guglielmo Coronini Cronberg was well aware of its importance and, since the 1950s, worked to rediscover its long-forgotten personality and in 1962 purchased the thirty drawings that constitute the nucleus from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. main part of the exhibition.

A practice at the time closely linked to the artistic education promoted by the academies, drawing always occupied a leading place in Francesco Caucig's activity: studies of nudes and anatomical parts, copies from ancient art and from the great masters of the past , obligatory in the period of training he completed in Rome, the views and landscapes, which constitute perhaps the most original and spontaneous aspect of his production, the detailed compositions of historical-mythological topics, preparatory for his large oil paintings.

After the research carried out for over fifty years by the Slovenian art historian Ksenija Rozman, who dissected every single aspect of his production, little seemed possible to add to the knowledge of Caucig. In reality, in the reconstruction of the artist's biography and career, the exhibition focuses on some important innovations, such as the Visitation altarpiece, recovered in 2021 after all traces of it were lost during the First World War, and the long, intimate friendship with the architect Pietro Nobile, documented by a collection of unpublished letters written by the painter between 1808 and 1818. Rich in news and personal anecdotes, this correspondence brings out Caucig's human side: his jovial and irreverent character, but also the acute and disenchanted gaze directed at the great historical events of which he was a direct witness. It is therefore his own words that express professional frustrations and disappointments, that recount in dramatic tones the last phases of Napoleon's parable, that evoke with a touch of irony the balls and sumptuous receptions organized in Vienna during the Congress.