Parma, The new Pilotta
Exhibition curated by Simone Verde
It also aims to be a virtuous solution to a long-standing exhibition problem that all the directors of the former National Gallery have faced. The Rocchetta, the theater of this “permanent exhibition,” is in fact a crucial space from a historical point of view but difficult to museumize. Correggio’s altarpieces are found there in a historicized and therefore immovable nineteenth-century installation. They are at the end of the itinerary, however, chronologically decontextualized from contemporary production and come after the eighteenth-century works, exhibited in the ancient halls of the Academy.
There has always been a problem on how to justify this placement that this installation has finally resolved: the Correggio of these spaces, in fact, is not a fully Renaissance Correggio, but reinvented by the 19th century, for the use of the copyists of the Academy. Taken down from the altars of the churches where he was located, he is a now bourgeois master that the visitor finds set up at eye level for a face-to-face dialogue. To explain the meaning of this cultural upheaval, a comprehensive itinerary has therefore been created, typical of a contemporary museum that is simultaneously required to narrate the history of art and that of the collections. With “The Nineteenth Century and the Myth of Correggio”, therefore, the visitor will find clarified the meaning of the removal of the works from the sacred buildings from which they come and – thanks to the exhibition of the nineteenth-century painting of the Pilotta to the public for the first time – the artistic context of this reinvention.
Around the four masterpieces by Correggio – The Madonna with the Bowl and the Madonna of Saint Jerome plus the two canvases from the Cappella del Bono – which with the Second Treaty of Paris in 1815 were returned to Parma from the Louvre where they had flowed as a result of the Napoleonic requisitions of 1796, the exhibition also presents the best of the nineteenth-century production of the Duchy, in the era in which this “secularized” Correggio became the hero of national painting in Parma. Going by dates, in 1816 the Palazzo della Pilotta represented a suitable refuge to accommodate the artistic heritage that needed to be recomposed and enhanced; with the project by Pietro De Lama the works of Correggio found an initial installation in the spaces adjacent to the Teatro Farnese, where the Farnese library was housed in the past. Between 1821 and 1829, based on a project curated by Paolo Toschi, director of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the architect Nicolò Bettoli, the three halls concluded today by the statue of Canova dedicated to Maria Luigia were created, with a layout of neoclassical derivation. In March 1835, in the spaces of the Rocchetta adjacent to the halls, there was a project for a further layout conceived by Nicolò Bettoli and Paolo Toschi who, with the display of Correggio’s works in the intimate and private rooms of the Rocchetta, entrusted it with the role of sancta sanctorum of the Luigina picture gallery, valorizing them to a greater extent. From the Halls to the Rocchetta, the Enlightenment layout suddenly became romantic, a unique document of such a pivotal passage in the history of Italian museology.
The works to expand and renovate the rooms ended about twenty years later, in 1855, after several interruptions; the outcome of this intervention was unfortunately never seen by its designers, who died in 1854. The one who united the great Renaissance master and the nineteenth-century masterpieces was Paolo Toschi, a refined engraver, architect and director of the Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1757 by Duke Philip of Bourbon, then strongly supported by the Duchess. Toschi wanted the two altarpieces and the two canvases to become exercise tools for the students of his Academy. Some of them were therefore placed on structures that made them orientable to facilitate illumination, or viewing in any light. Toschi, then, with his ambitious project to reproduce in watercolour, and then to disseminate through engravings, Correggio’s Frescoes, contributed to the fame of the master and the city, with the diffusion of the artist’s work throughout Europe. The study and execution of the watercolours required five years of work, from 1839 to 1843. His are the watercolours that reproduce the frescoes of the Cathedral and of San Giovanni that can be admired on display between the two altarpieces, some sent to the Great Exhibition of London in 1855 to represent the art of the Duchy. Many of his works and those of his students are therefore exhibited in these rooms in counterpoint with the Renaissance originals, giving the visitor the sense of a cultural and artistic reinvention of primary importance not only for museology, but also for the historiography of Italian art.
Toschi’s vision of art, strong in his Parisian education and reinforced by artistic relationships throughout Europe, immediately proved open to the nascent romantic taste for historical subjects and nature, managing to broaden the artistic horizon beyond the tired re-propositions of an official art that were influenced by a neoclassical taste of still imperial ancestry. In the exhibition, the work of Francesco Scaramuzza belongs to the first trend, represented by a monumental Silvia and Aminta, sent in 1862 to illustrate Parma at the Universal Exhibition in London. More accommodating to the romantic taste are the two magnificent Rebel purchased directly by Maria Luigia, the two monumental canvases by Giuseppe Molteni, another “official” painter of the Luigino duchy, while the small work by Ferdinando Storelli represents the aesthetics of what the Duchess wanted as a long-lived and significant Parma school of landscape painting.
One of the areas in which Luigi’s patronage was most expressed was undoubtedly that of religious painting, marked by a paternalistic conception of the State. In fact, merciful iconographies, or celebrating almsgiving activities or sovereign donations, multiplied beyond measure and saw the active participation of the official artists of the court. Examples include Saint John the Baptist by Francesco Scaramuzza and David with the Head of Goliath by Enrico Barbieri. In several works, the reference to the masters of Emilian painting appears to be declined in a “nationalistic” key of exaltation of the genius of Parma. Which is also genius and celebration of the artist, as expressed by the flourishing of the self-portrait genre.
Throughout history, the technical reproducibility of works of art has been experimented with in the methodologies of bronze casting, coin minting, xylography and lithography as the reproduction of graphics and printing as the technical reproducibility of writing. With the invention of photography, the first experiments of which began to spread in Italy in 1839, just when Toschi began the wonderful undertaking of Correggio’s “Freschi”, the reproducibility of the visible was freed from the conditioning of manual skill. This new paradigm thus burst into the ancient Duchy, forcing the academic culture of Parma to emancipate itself. Thus, landscape painting is now focused on the forces – natural and therefore scientific – that characterize the universal vastness of reality and the spectacular canvases of Alberto Pasini, like the slide shows of the time, reproduce in an immersive way the exotic landscapes in which the life of the most remote peoples took place. Cecrope Barilli meanwhile searches for the exotic hidden in the primitive of popular classes dedicated to forms of existence similar to those of the colonized lands. And it is already an entry into the new century in the dramas of a globalization that still persists today.
By precise strategic choice of the Director Simone Verde, this exhibition, after the exhibition period, will be transformed into a permanent section of the large art gallery of the Nuova Pilotta. The works with the relative exhibition panels will remain on the walls, while the extensive documentary set of in-depth analysis and comparison proposed by the temporary exhibition will remain documented by the exhibition catalogue.
Galleria
