From July 25 to Nov. 2, 2025, Pontremoli, a town nestled in theTuscan-Emilian Apennines at the crossroads of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Liguria, will host a major exhibition event. In the Hall of Mayors of the Municipal Palace, the three versions of the famous painting Pietro Rossi in the Castle of Pontremoli by Francesco Hayez (Venice, 1791 - Milan, 1882), considered one of the main interpreters of Italian Romanticism, will be presented together for the first time in history. The exhibition, curated by Valentina Ferrari, Paolo Lapi and Fernando Mazzocca, is organized by the Municipality of Pontremoli and the Brera Art Gallery, with the patronage of the Region of Tuscany, the Province of Massa Carrara and the Museum of Lunigiana Stele Statues. Also collaborating are the Brera Academy and the Bank of Italy, which have contributed to the exceptional reunion of works by lending the canvases kept in their respective collections.
The initiative is part of the new project La Grande Brera in tour, conceived by the Pinacoteca di Brera and aimed at remounting, in historically significant contexts, works that have suffered spoliation or that recount episodes deeply linked to specific places. As Angelo Crespi, Director General of the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Braidense Library and Palazzo Citterio, pointed out, the exhibition “wants to reunite the works with the places that were the sites intended for their original location, thus compensating, albeit temporarily, for the removal carried out during the Napoleonic requisitions or, as in this case, by rearranging the scenic settings represented in them. A definitive way of realizing the idea of the widespread museum.”
Pontremoli, in this case, represents the original context of the event depicted by Francesco Hayez in his three paintings. The episode took place on June 13, 1336, when the town, occupied by the Rossi family, a noble house of Parma, was besieged by the Scaligeri led by Simone da Correggio. Pietro Rossi, a member of the lineage, was in Pontremoli castle with his wife Ginetta de’ Fieschi and daughters after the Scaligeri had occupied most of his family’s domains. During this period of resistance, Pietro received a proposal from Doge Francesco Dandolo: the Senate of the Venetian Republic asked him to take command of the Serenissima army to counter the Scaliger expansion. Despite pleas from his wife and daughters, Rossi accepted the assignment, leaving Pontremoli to join first Florence, an ally of Venice, and then Venice itself, where on October 1 he received the banner of the Venetian army from the hands of the doge.
This passage, in which civic and military obligation prevails over family affection, was the thematic core that struck Francesco Hayez. The artist, who was born in 1791 and died in 1882, made it one of the central moments of his pictorial production, fascinated by the contrast between duty and private feelings. The choice to tell a story that was little known at the time reflects Hayez’s interest in the evocation of the historical past as a means of exploring moral and emotional tensions, a distinctive element of Romantic art.
The first of the three paintings was made in 1820 and exhibited that same year at the annual exhibition of the Brera Academy. The work was so successful that it is considered the starting point of pictorial Romanticism in Italy. It is now part of the 19th-century collections of the Pinacoteca di Brera. Thirty years later, in 1850, Hayez returned to the same theme, proposing a new version of the subject, now preserved in the art collection of the Bank of Italy. This second work presents a more mature and conscious compositional and chromatic rendering, the result of the experience accumulated by the painter over decades. Finally, the third version is a preparatory sketch for the replica of the second canvas. Placed in the first half of the 19th century, the sketch was donated by Hayez himself to theBrera Academy, where it is still preserved. Despite its small size and study character, the work already shows in nuce the dramatic setting and narrative force that would characterize the two major versions.
Bringing these three paintings together in a single space and in the very place where the narrated events took place has not only artistic value, but also represents an opportunity for historical reinterpretation. As Jacopo Maria Ferri, Mayor of Pontremoli, stated, "the link with Francesco Hayez today is consolidated and finds its most concrete and exemplary crowning in our Hall of Mayors, now transformed into a true exhibition space par excellence. The Pinacoteca di Brera, the Accademia di Brera and the Banca d’Italia have generously lent three works of great prestige, value and beauty, making it possible in our city to admire, reunited together for the first time in the same place where the episode that inspired them took place, the three versions of the fundamental work in Hayez’s artistic journey: Pietro Rossi in the Castle of Pontremoli."
The event thus stands as an important milestone in both the enhancement of the artistic heritage of Romanticism and the promotion of a cultural model that takes into account the territorial and historical dimensions of the works. The exhibition aims not only to document Hayez’s stylistic and narrative evolution over three decades, but also to extend an invitation to a comparison of the pictorial languages, compositional choices and cultural references that each version embodies. “With this exhibition,” says curator Fernando Mazzocca, “we wanted to create a fascinating and stimulating journey in Hayez’s historical painting reconsidered, through this particular theme, in its evolution relative also to the unfolding of the events of the Risorgimento, of which the artist celebrated by Giuseppe Mazzini was a witness and interpreter.”
Inside the Hall of Mayors, the works are set up in a way that allows a visual and thematic dialogue between the different versions, offering the public tools to grasp the variations, references and constants. This is a rare opportunity to closely analyze the creative process of a 19th-century master, while immersing oneself in a historical event that, while niche, takes on universal significance. The exhibition, accompanied by a Dario Cimorelli Editore catalog, will be on view until Nov. 2, 2025, and is a landmark event in the context of celebrations and reflections on Romantic art in Italy. The installation in Pontremoli demonstrates how even small towns can become places of high culture, capable of attracting public and media attention thanks to rigorous and innovative exhibition offerings.
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| Hayez and Romanticism in in Pontremoli with three masterpieces brought together for the first time |
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