The San Domenico Museums in Forlì, from 13 February to 26 June 2016, are home to the major new exhibition entitled Piero della Francesca. Indagine su un mito, the theme and the fascinating reflection between criticism and art, historical research and artistic production over more than five centuries of history.

The precocious influence of flemish painting will be seen in a fresco by the portuguese painter Giovanni di Consalvo from the Chiostro deli Aranci at the Badia Fiorentina, where the precision of the perspective construction is accompanied by an unusual attention to light and shade.

The travels which the artist undertook to northeastern Italy (Modena, Bologna, Rimini, Ferrara, Ancona) prompted the growth of a “cultura pierfrancescana” identified by modern scholarship in the works of Emilian artists (Marco Zoppo, Francesco del Cossa, Cristoforo da Lendinara, Bartolomeo Bonascia), also included here. Likewise, Piero’s painting was echoed in the Marches (Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio da Camerino, Nicola di
Maestro Antonio), Tuscany (Bartolomeo della Gatta, Luca Signorelli) and Rome (Melozzo da Forlì, Antoniazzo Romano).
A widely-accepted hypothesis suggests Piero’s language also made its mark in Venice, where the work of Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina shows their awareness of his mode of expression.

The exhibition will open on the ground floor of the San Domenico complex, juxtaposing Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia and the Silvana Cenni by Felice Casorati, and will consider the modern birth of the Piero legend through the writings of his principal devotees, Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi.
The rooms dedicated to Piero della Francesca will be preceded by a generous selection of material demonstrating how new interest in the artist grew during the 1800s: from the drawings by Johann Anton Ramboux, to the extraordinary life-size copies of the Arezzo frescoes produced in 1872-1874 by Charles Loyeux, till the key english discovery, during the first part of the XX century, namely to Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, of which writer Virginia Wolf took part also. The profound appeal of the Arezzo frescoes seems to re-emerge DasDegas. A similar path of assimilation, though stylistically varied, appears in the avant-garde works of the Macchiaioli.

Echoes of Piero even appear in the works of Seurat and Signac and this becomes more explicit among the post-Impressionists, in the last purist flashes of Puvis de Chavannes, the metaphysical experiments of Odilon Redon, and above all the geometric views of Cézanne. The 1900s were the “century of Piero” in a number of ways: not only for the ever-increasing study of his oeuvre, as fascinating as it was problematic (and even mysterious, for some), but also for the centrality he gradually took on in the realm of the Italian Renaissance. At the same time his works were considered exemplary by painters who, whatever their scope or style, consistently appreciated his abstract rigor and geometric measure, or were drawn to a rarefied, distant style that might even assume a sense of disquiet.

As with the section on the 1800s, the exhibition will retrace the extraordinary evolution of Piero’s fortune in the 1900s, making new connections and following the various stages of the “return to order”: italian artists - Guidi, Carrà, Donghi, Chirico, Casorati, Morandi, Funi, Campigli, Ferrazzi, Sironi - will be compared with foreigners such as Balthus and Hopper, who wore the mantle of Piero in a fully modern style.


Visiting hours:
Tuesday to Friday 9.30 -19.00
Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays from 9.30 to 20.00
closed on Mondays

Info: + 39 0543 1912030 -031

Reservations:
mostrapierodellafransca@civita.it

Info: Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì

Info: Sito dedicato alla mostra