ART FOR ART’S SAKE. From Previati to Mentessi, from Boldini to De Pisis. A new journey for the Castello Estense

The 2016 edition of “Art for art’s sake” will open with a glimpse of Italian art between the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing attention on the contribution by the Ferrara artists: a short but interesting journey among some of the different directions which competed to renovate conventional art language at the end of the 19th century: from the poetics of truth to the arts of ideas, from Macchiaioli painting to divisionism, from representations of modern life to evocative Liberty decorations.

Among the protagonists there are artists from Ferrara, who are active on the Italian stage, such as Giuseppe Mentessi, Alberto Pisa or Arrigo Minerbi and alongside these, internationally famous people such as Giovanni Boldini, the celebrated portrait painter during the Belle Époque, and Gaetano Previati who was a spokesman for divisionism and of the Vague belonging to the Symbolism movement. The order develops through thematic rooms which recall the main research motifs between the 19th and 20th centuries: the modern portrait and its new codes, the historic-allegoric themes and the monumental and decorative dimension, the new subjects of modernity, the true landscape and the landscape of the soul, the moral and spiritual tension at the eve of the Great War.

The journey then continues in the beautiful Camerini of Alfonso I, where there is the selection of masterpieces by Filippo de Pisis, which narrates the artistic parabola of another talent from Ferrara, active on the Italian and Parisian stage from the Twenties of the 20th century. The very rich Ferrara trove of work by De Pisis, mainly built up thanks to the activity of the Foundation Pianori and to the generous bequest by Manlio and Franca Malabotta, allows revisiting his entire creative process.