The Villa Adriana and Villa d'Este Institute – VILLÆ presents the exhibition D'après nature: Giorgio Morandi / Cy Twombly in the rooms of Villa d'Este in Tivoli from 7 December 2023 to 5 May 2024. The important exhibition project is part of in the 2023 / 24 programming of the Institute dedicated to a reflection on landscape in the contemporary world and anticipates the prestigious review dedicated to the importance of Villa d'Este in the history of art and in the iconography of the Grand Tour next spring.

A place of transformation and integration between nature and the work of man, the Tiburto site welcomes and reflects the most intimate aspects in the works of art of the two great masters of the 20th century, ideally united by the decorated Renaissance environments that entirely cover the walls of the rooms of Villa d'Este. For both we are talking about a sort of minimal alphabet used to express reality in essential ways, thus arriving at a language that goes beyond the retinal data.

Morandi's themes are in fact phenomenological due to their minimal change in form: the landscape always contributes to confirming the same different present, revealing with imperceptible declinations and variables the soul and essence of a daily life that reverberates in his study and in his dear Apennines. Similarly, in Twombly, we witness the decoding of reality through a photographic language made of quick shots, which stage an intimate diary with a strong biographical characterization. The light, the blurred shapes of the details are the compositional coordinates for a fragmentary, transient image, fragile in its immediacy.

The exhibition, which was born from the collaboration with the Morandi Museum | Civic Museums Sector of Bologna, the Nicola Del Roscio Foundation of Rome, with the help of Cristian Grasu, and some private loans, therefore intends to investigate the sensitivity and 'sentimental' affinity that characterizes the naturalistic canon of two great masters, such as Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 – 1964) and Cy Twombly (Lexington, 1928 – Rome, 2011). Paintings, watercolors and drawings by the former, as well as photographic images and archive documents by the latter, are therefore proposed in dialogue.