VITTORIO CORCOS PORTRAITS AND DREAMS

Palazzo Pallavicini in Bologna reopens to the public from Tuesday to Sunday

Vittorio Corcos Portraits and Dreams reopens at Palazzo Pallavicini from April 27 to June 27, 2021 with over 40 majestic paintings from public and private collections. The exhibition curated by Prof. Carlo Sisi, organized by Pallavicini s.r.l. with Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni, and Rubens Fogacci, retraces the entire artistic career of Vittorio Corcos, considered alongside Boldini and De Nittis, one of the most appreciated interpreters of the feelings and customs of the Belle Époque.

Innovative in the realm of realistic portraiture, his fame is deeply tied to female figures. The most beautiful and notable women of the era are the undisputed protagonists of the artist’s portraits, characterized by the psychological depth of the gazes that endow the subjects with a mysterious magnetism and by the almost photographic meticulousness in the representation of luxurious objects and fabrics. For this reason, Corcos’s women were described as creatures that possess something of both the ghost and the flower.

Among his most intriguing works on display is a portrait of a woman with a thoughtful and introverted gaze, deemed by some critics of the time to be too explicit for its bold and unconventional pose. This is the work Dreams from 1896, exhibited the following year at the “International Artistic Exhibition of Florence, Festival of Art and Flowers,” which, following great public and critical attention, was immediately acquired by the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

Dreams 1896, oil on canvas, 161×135 cm, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome

The universe of aristocratic and upper-middle-class femininity finds a perfect representation in the precious portrait dedicated to the soprano and film actress Lina Cavalieri, considered by Gabriele D’Annunzio as “the highest testimony of Venus on earth,” also present among the works exhibited at Palazzo Pallavicini. His production is enriched with landscapes bathed in the light of the Livorno coast and a series of incredible male portraits, including Self-Portrait from 1913, specifically requested for the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, the Portrait of Giosuè Carducci from 1892, the Portrait of the publisher Treves and the famous critic Yorick, who, along with other intellectuals of the time, gravitated around the literary salon of Corcos and his wife Emma, referred to by Giovanni Pascoli as “the gentle woman” or “gentile ignota” because “of such spirit, such refinement, such depth, such culture.”

The exhibition addresses the key themes of the painter’s presence in figurative culture from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first three decades of the following century and is divided into six sections: family and friends in the salon of the “gentile ignota”; the Paris years; the primacy of the portrait; the peintre des jolies femmes; Mediterranean light and states of mind. The selected works come from the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the Uffizi Galleries, the Modern Art Gallery in Milan, the Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum, the Goldoni Art Gallery in Livorno, the Livorno Foundation, the Society of Fine Arts, and the Matteucci Institute in Viareggio, the 19th-century Art Studio in Livorno and the 19th-century gallery in Milan, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum System of the University of Bologna, the Franco Maria Ricci Collection, and other private collections.