On Monday 21 November the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art will inaugurate the DOMENICO MORELLI exhibition. Imagining unseen things , curated by Chiara Stefani with Luisa Martorelli.

“Morelli was like the true artist must be, that is, he knew what he didn't know, and he saw what he had never seen before”. This is how the painter Eduardo Dalbono remembered him shortly after his death, evoking The Temptations of Saint Anthony as a masterful example of the artist's "intuitive and divining" faculties.

Almost seventy years after the exhibition of drawings staged by Palma Bucarelli in Valle Giulia in 1955, Domenico Morelli (Naples, 1823-1901) is once again the protagonist in the Via Gramsci rooms of the Galleria Nazionale, as he already was, in 1907. He was the fund consisting of graphic works, cartoons, sketches and paintings left in the artist's atelier at his death and purchased by the State has just been transferred from Naples to Rome : Francesco Jacovacci, then Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, had partially set up inside four rooms of the Palazzo delle Belle Arti in via Nazionale.

The exhibition is an opportunity to see a large part of the artist's very rich and heterogeneous fund together with works also coming from other public institutions or private collections, with the display of about thirty paintings and 9 sketches, 9 sculptures, a corpus of 48 oil tablets on wood with landscape paintings made on the coast south of Naples, a large mixed-media cartoon and a conspicuous selection of 160 works on paper, among the over 800 sheets belonging to the Morelli collection conserved by the National Gallery .

The gestation of Domenico Morelli's paintings is a process of continuous rethinking of the compositional solutions conceived after a careful study of the True, whose single elements are analyzed several times, before reaching the version deemed optimal. While the range of techniques employed by the artist on paper ranges from the use of graphite, charcoal, sanguine and pastel - accompanied in various cases by

white lead, as well as brown ink, often abundantly watered down – in watercolor and tempera in various shades, sometimes over traces of pencil, the sketches cancel out in color the careful graphic study of each preparatory sheet.