The natural beauty of the
Tuscan province of Lucca in the early 1900s will be on display
in the show 'Painting the Enchantment: Painters in the Lucca
Area at the Start of the 1900s', with works by artists including
Plinio Nomellini, Lorenzo Viani, and Carlo Carrà at the Monte di
Lucca Bank Foundation's Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Lucca
starting December 19 through January 17.
The show includes nearly 70 works in which local natural
features - the sea, forests, lakes, streams, and mountains -
were interpreted and represented by celebrated artists as a sort
of paradise on Earth, pure and uncontaminated by modern life.
The exhibition is part of 'Tuscany 1900s', an initiative of
the Region of Tuscany and the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze
bank, and was curated by Umberto Sereni, who chose the most
meaningful paintings as testimonials of a widespread feeling,
even at an international level, between the 19th and 20th
century.
The show aims to "transmit to the visitor that enchantment
with which artists from across Europe fell in love. In all of
Tuscany there aren't other examples of experiences similar to
those which came about in Lucca," Sereni said.
The Foundation's coordinator, Maria Stuarda Varetti, said
the exhibit's layout intends to "tell the story of the different
cultural aspects that came about in the province of Lucca in
that period of time, also deeply influenced by literary and
musical productions that the territory succeeded in expressing".
The presence of painters from the United Kingdom is
numerous and significant.
They were called to Tuscany and to Versilia in the
footsteps of the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who
drowned off Viareggio in 1822.
These artists and writers had left behind a country
overwhelmed by the Industrial Revolution and rediscovered in
this swathe of Tuscany an intact natural and farming world,
where production times still corresponded to nature's times.
Even Lucca itself, with its extraordinary monuments - first
among which figures the splendid marble tomb of Ilaria del
Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia in the Cathedral of San Martino
- became an emblem of eternal beauty.
Among the works on display at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni
are paintings by Moses Levy, Alfredo Meschi, Nino Carrara and
Giovan Battista Santini, as well as contemporary artists
including Marzia Martelli, Alessandro Tofanelli, Antonio
Vignocchi and Marco Pasega.
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