This room houses the masterpieces of artists who experienced intense bonds of esteem and friendship, feelings that grew as a result of sharing a new sensitivity with regard to how landscape should be represented: they wanted it to be as “faithful and sincere” as possible to the reality of nature, an approach that would have been hard to reconcile with the precept of an “ideal beauty of nature” that was still very widespread and appreciated in the academies of fine art in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The benchmark for the launch of this new sensitivity was Antonio Fontanesi, who had been obliged to flee to Switzerland in 1848 in the aftermath of the failure of Italy’s first war of independence. In 1850, he moved to Geneva, the city that was an important artistic crossroads at that time, because of the presence of the landscape painter Alexandre Calame and of the school that attracted numerous pupils, many of them from Italy.
Fontanesi had what it took to confront those models and break out of them, coming into contact with such artists as Corot, Daubigny, Troyon and Ravier, who were leaders in the more advanced French landscape painting. Following their example, he started studying landscape by painting en plein air, an approach that called for the artist to go out into nature and capture a particular condition of light, making the colours and atmospheres of a landscape unique. In Fontanesi, this exercise was to lay the foundation for achieving an incomparable degree of poetry.
Starting from his example, this section of the exhibition enables visitors to appreciate the different approaches to research employed by artists who often belonged to groups or brotherhoods, like the ones of Rivara and of Carcare, and decided to paint en plein air, identifying with the sentiment of “truth” also in their choice of subjects, which were often connected with life in the countryside. United by their firm friendships, such artists as Carlo Pittara, Ernesto Bertea and Vittorio Avondo, who would meet in Rivara, in the Canavese area outside Turin, came into contact – through the good offices of Tammar Luxoro – with Ernesto Rayper, Alfredo de Andrade and Serafin de Avendaño, who had their own point of reference for their research at Carcare, in the vicinity of Savona. It is in the chromatic lighting of their palettes, the unexpected angles of their compositions and the surprising ways they rendered light to shape their paintings that we discover the traces of the courageous research that contributed, through the choice of painting landscapes, to shaking off Italian painting’s provincialism.