Descrizione
Storia dell’arte n. 161
Nuova Serie 1 | 2024
Francesco Leone
Nuovi linguaggi per la nuova nazione: da Firenze 1861 agli affreschi di Maccari per la Sala Gialla del Senato
The birth of the Kingdom of Italy triggered a renewal of historical painting that was as radical as it was essential. It became necessary to reconfigure the style, the significance and the content of this ancient yet far from spent artistic genre following the unification of Italy, in the course of the long and controversial process of national cultural unification that characterised the latter part of the 19th century spawned by the young nation’s need to forge an identity.
The essay examines historical sources and documents to review the path leading from the National Agrarian Exhibition, which opened in Florence in September 1861, via a series of National Exhibitions held in various Italian cities over the years, to Cesare Maccari’s frescoes for the Yellow Room in the Senate building in Rome, which were unveiled in 1888. Conjugating the academic formalism of the Tuscan painterly tradition with the characteristic features of European realism and the new international fashion for what became known as “archaeological” painting, the frescoes in the Senate, which marked the high point in a series of monumental public decorations undertaken by the House of Savoy in Italy’s most important cities, offered official Italian art a stately, solemn style broadly representing the nation as a whole, that allowed Maccari’s huge talent and considerable mastery of technique to emerge in full.