Art- Nouveau in Italy

Padua's Palazzo Zabarella is currently the backdrop for the revised edition of the show organized by Fabio Benzi for the Roman museum of the Chiostro del Bramante. The exhibition hosts many works that for reasons of space were not present in the Roman exhibition, providing an even more thorough look at the Art-Nouveau movement. 
The last great exhibition on Art-Nouveau took place in Lugano in 1980. While it is true that in the last few years this movement has been enjoying a second youth, thanks to the incredible revival that has exalted its characteristics, somehow reducing them to a fashion issue, it is also true that the many studies, carried out over the past years, can now provide a clearer and more detailed picture of the artistic climate of the period that goes from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The show is comprised of approximately 350 of the most significant works by Italian artists such as Segantini, Previati, Pellizza da Volpedo, Boccioni, Balla and many others. The journey through the artistic movement also aims to discredit a commonly held belief, that can in part be ascribed to the widespread lamentations of Italian intellectuals, according to whom the circulation of Art-Nouveau in Italy took hold very late. Although partly true, this concept doesn't do justice to the innovative and profound contribution provided by certain Italian artistic personalities who also took part in the European aesthetic debate. The cultural and aesthetic movement known as New Art, and also termed "floral" for its penchant for biological forms, both natural and phytomorphous, started off in England through the celebrated shop "Liberty & Co", and subsequently spread from France too, through another commercial venture called precisely "Art Nouveau".
The style of the products sold in these shops was an abundance of items taken from nature and from the two worlds, vegetable and animal. These parallel aspects of nature were conceived as a unique and harmonious whole from which to draw artistic inspiration. They sprouted up in painting, in sculpture, in the applied arts and in every object of everyday life: floral motifs, delicate wooded ribbings, vegetable environments, tendrils, mouldings. At the same time, in a climate of spring blossoming, art was populated by the smallest and most vulnerable of animal creatures, by insects and small water molluscs, unusual and shy. The shapes with which these subjects were depicted were always curving lines, supple shapes that originated out of the eighteenth century PreRaphaelite movement.
This new taste and form received decisive input from the positivist philosophical movement, that with its trust in reason, set in motion new scientific and naturalist studies through which Man dominated, or believed he dominated, nature. This cultural milieu, that seems to have had an entirely European origin, was joined by Italian authors belonging to the Divisionist movement.
Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati, as early as the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, began elaborating the new aesthetic sensibility. In the Nineties the Art-Nouveau taste was taken up by Italian artists.
Galileo Chini published illustrations in pure Art-Nouveau style and with him many other symbolist artists that were soon followed by  exponents of Futurism, such as Boccioni and Balla. This show thus allows one to retrace the gradual and ever increasing interest of Italian artists in Art-Nouveau. On display are many works of sculpture, painting, crafts and everyday household objects, as well as examples of advertising, theatre and film billboards.

Il Liberty in Italia
Palazzo Zabarella, Via S. Francesco 27 
Padua
from the 18th of November to the 3rd of March 2002
everyday from 9.30 to 19.30
closed on Mondays
lire 12.000, 10.000

Art- Nouveau in Italy

Padua's Palazzo Zabarella is currently the backdrop for the revised edition of the show organized by Fabio Benzi for the Roman museum of the Chiostro del Bramante. The exhibition hosts many works that for reasons of space were not present in the Roman exhibition, providing an even more thorough look at the Art-Nouveau movement. 
The last great exhibition on Art-Nouveau took place in Lugano in 1980. While it is true that in the last few years this movement has been enjoying a second youth, thanks to the incredible revival that has exalted its characteristics, somehow reducing them to a fashion issue, it is also true that the many studies, carried out over the past years, can now provide a clearer and more detailed picture of the artistic climate of the period that goes from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The show is comprised of approximately 350 of the most significant works by Italian artists such as Segantini, Previati, Pellizza da Volpedo, Boccioni, Balla and many others. The journey through the artistic movement also aims to discredit a commonly held belief, that can in part be ascribed to the widespread lamentations of Italian intellectuals, according to whom the circulation of Art-Nouveau in Italy took hold very late. Although partly true, this concept doesn't do justice to the innovative and profound contribution provided by certain Italian artistic personalities who also took part in the European aesthetic debate. The cultural and aesthetic movement known as New Art, and also termed "floral" for its penchant for biological forms, both natural and phytomorphous, started off in England through the celebrated shop "Liberty & Co", and subsequently spread from France too, through another commercial venture called precisely "Art Nouveau".
The style of the products sold in these shops was an abundance of items taken from nature and from the two worlds, vegetable and animal. These parallel aspects of nature were conceived as a unique and harmonious whole from which to draw artistic inspiration. They sprouted up in painting, in sculpture, in the applied arts and in every object of everyday life: floral motifs, delicate wooded ribbings, vegetable environments, tendrils, mouldings. At the same time, in a climate of spring blossoming, art was populated by the smallest and most vulnerable of animal creatures, by insects and small water molluscs, unusual and shy. The shapes with which these subjects were depicted were always curving lines, supple shapes that originated out of the eighteenth century PreRaphaelite movement.
This new taste and form received decisive input from the positivist philosophical movement, that with its trust in reason, set in motion new scientific and naturalist studies through which Man dominated, or believed he dominated, nature. This cultural milieu, that seems to have had an entirely European origin, was joined by Italian authors belonging to the Divisionist movement.
Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati, as early as the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, began elaborating the new aesthetic sensibility. In the Nineties the Art-Nouveau taste was taken up by Italian artists.
Galileo Chini published illustrations in pure Art-Nouveau style and with him many other symbolist artists that were soon followed by  exponents of Futurism, such as Boccioni and Balla. This show thus allows one to retrace the gradual and ever increasing interest of Italian artists in Art-Nouveau. On display are many works of sculpture, painting, crafts and everyday household objects, as well as examples of advertising, theatre and film billboards.

Il Liberty in Italia
Palazzo Zabarella, Via S. Francesco 27 
Padua
from the 18th of November to the 3rd of March 2002
everyday from 9.30 to 19.30
closed on Mondays
lire 12.000, 10.000