The female figure as a moral paradigm, dramatic force, and symbolic center of the great Baroque theater. From April 3 to June 28, 2026, La Galleria BPER in Modena presents Virtue and Grace. Women figures in Baroque painting, an exhibition curated by Lucia Peruzzi and under the patronage of the Municipality of Modena, bringing together a significant selection of 17th-century paintings from the BPER Group collection and important institutional loans.

The project offers a thematic journey through Baroque painting focusing on the centrality of women: saint, virgin, martyr, biblical heroine, pagan goddess, seductress, allegory. A plurality of figures that in the 17th century assumes a new role as an absolute protagonist, reflecting spiritual tensions, moral conflicts, passions, and social transformations of the Counter-Reformation era.

The exhibition path is divided into five thematic nuclei that intertwine devotion, myth, power, and sentiment, putting into dialogue works by masters such as Lucio Massari, Guido Cagnacci, Ludovico Carracci, Rutilio Manetti, Domenico Piola, Sisto Badalocchio, Giovanni Battista Castiglione, Giacomo Cavedoni, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Alessandro Tiarini, and Valerio Castello, alongside works from the Civic Museum, the Estense Library of Modena, and private collections.

From the penitent saints to the heroines of the Old Testament, from the violated nymphs of classical mythology to the protagonists of the Gerusalemme Liberata, the exhibition conveys the intensity of an artistic season that uses the female figure as an exemplum of virtue and as a tool of emotional persuasion. In the grand Baroque scenic device, the body, gesture, and expression become vehicles of meditation and theater of emotions.

The path concludes with a section dedicated to Allegory, a perfect synthesis of seventeenth-century aesthetics: images capable of surprising and warning at the same time, transforming sensitive beauty into moral concept.