Curated by Aberto Salvadori and Luigi Fassi

Allori senza fronde presents for the first time to the Italian public a fascinating exploration of the artistic laboratory of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , a leading artist of French art between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and whose activity has strongly influenced the artistic development of the generations that followed him. , as evidenced by the continuous admiration paid to him by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, George Seurat and Henry Matisse.

Composed of loans from private and public collections, the exhibition presents a selection of works on paper and paintings by a key artist of the late 19th century.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon, France in 1824, the youngest of four children of a family descended from the Burgundian nobility. Interrupted his engineering studies following the death of his mother and a long illness, Puvis spent a long stay in Italy to regain his health.

This Italian experience, together with the encounter with the works of Giotto and Piero della Francesca , had a profound impression on Puvis, who decided to devote himself entirely to art after his return to Paris in 1848. Puvis began to work in the studios of Henri Scheffer, Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture, eschewing conventional artistic training and painting alone in his studio. His interest in the great heroic themes and the classical imagery led Puvis to undertake mural painting, considered at that time the supreme ambition for all the most ambitious realist painters.

Throughout his four-decade career, Puvis constantly sought to perfect a classic and highly decorative aesthetic. The French artist developed an original palette of opaque and bleached shades, painted to infuse his figures with solidity and character. His mastery emerges in finely calibrated compositions that further enhance his ethereal realism and lend his figures essential solitude. Free from shared movements and categories, Puvis, as emerges from the exhibition, moves between symbolism and realism, drawings and oils on canvas, sketches and sketches, in search of a redemption of human dignity that has its roots in the humanistic culture of the Italian Renaissance . It is precisely from that extraordinary chapter of Italian history that we can best understand the work of Puvis de Chavannes, an artist who invites us to look at our time through the filter of the slow sedimentation of culture over the centuries.