For Antonio Fontanesi, protagonist of the 19th century between Morbelli and Pellizza da Volpedo, a major exhibition in Reggio Emilia

The Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia is hosting, from April 6 to July 14, 2019, a major exhibition dedicated to one of the most important protagonists of 19th-century art, Antonio Fontanesi (Reggio Emilia, 1818 - Turin, 1882). The exhibition aims to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Reggio Emilia artist, interpreter of the Romantic landscape, experimental artist and restless man.

The exhibition, entitled Antonio Fontanesi and His Legacy. From Pellizza da Volpedo to Burri and curated by Virginia Bertone, Elisabetta Farioli and Claudio Spadoni, not only reconstructs his artistic journey through his most important works, but also offers a novel critical contribution to the knowledge of his art by insisting on the influence his art had on the artists of the younger generations: Many in fact recognized themselves in his particular approach to nature and landscape, suspended between the need for representation of the real and the urgency to express their most intimate emotions.

The public will have the opportunity to admire some of Fontanesi’s most significant works, arriving from museums and private collections, but not only, because his works will be compared with the artists that critics have linked to his production, identifying possible motifs of inspiration over a long span of time, from the 1880s to the 1960s. Relationships with Symbolist and Divisionist culture will be documented through works by Vittore Grubicy, Leonardo Bistolfi, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and Angelo Morbelli, but also the interest in Fontanesi in the 1920s, in the works of artists such as Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, and Arturo Tosi, to arrive, in the last section, at the interesting critical interpretations of the 1950s by two of the most important Italian art historians ever, Roberto Longhi and Francesco Arcangeli. Arcangeli himself, in identifying a continuity between the modern conception of art and the great nineteenth-century tradition, inserts Fontanesi in the evolution of a naturalism that in the postwar period reaches Ennio Morlotti, Mattia Moreni, Pompilio Mandelli pushing on to Alberto Burri’s material research.

Promoted by the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, in collaboration with the Fondazione Torino Musei-Galleria d’Arte Moderna and the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza, the exhibition is organized in partnership with the Emilia Romagna Region-Institute for Cultural and Natural Artistic Heritage, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio P. Manodori of Reggio Emilia, Destinazione Emilia, Unioncamere Emilia Romagna, Chamber of Commerce of Reggio Emilia, APT Servizi, with the art bonus contribution of CAR SERVER, CREDEM, IREN.

For more information about the exhibition, it is possible to contact the Reggio Emilia Civic Museums at 0522 456477 or 0522 456805, send an e-mail to musei@municipio.re.it, or visit www.musei.comune.re.it.

Pictured: Antonio Fontanesi, The Solitude (1875; Reggio Emilia Civic Museums).

For Antonio Fontanesi, protagonist of the 19th century between Morbelli and Pellizza da Volpedo, a major exhibition in Reggio Emilia

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