Verso la modernità [ENG]

A childhood reality and imagination populated by women nourished the art and existential reflections of Massimo Campigli, pseudonym of Max Ihlenfeld, throughout his life. Campigli discovered the passion and practice of painting after his move to Paris, but it was during a trip to Rome in 1928 that the painter was dazzled by Etruscan art. The artist thus found his signature style: dry painting reca...

The last two sections of the exhibition are housed in the council chamber: the most representative room in the building, which preserves its 19th-century atmosphere intact. It now hosts the meetings of the Consiglio di Reggenza, in charge of the administration of the Banca d’Italia’s Florence branch. While the goddess Flora seems to scatter her flowers from the ceiling into the space below, the pa...

From the fabrics that cover the walls to the decorative details of the ceiling, the colour of the sky dominates in the blue room. Indeed, Venus looks out from a central oval open onto the firmament, holding a dove and surrounded by grotesques inhabited by female figures of mythological inspiration. The goddess introduces us to two artists featured in this part of the exhibition: Leonetta Cecchi Pi...

The second floor of the building was the private residence of the director general of the Banca Nazionale. As on the first floor, here, too, the ceiling of the bright entrance foyer is decorated with false coffers, made by Luigi Samoggia of Bologna. Italian and European artistic research opened up after the Great War with a return to form, to plasticism and volumetry. Many artists, often back from...

The three women featured in this part of the exhibition seem elegant, emancipated and fashionable. Baroness Chiarandà, wife of the painter and collector Carlo, at the heart of the Neapolitan cultural scene between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appears smiling and confident in the portrait by Vincenzo Irolli, formally not far from the manner of Antonio Mancini. Standing out aga...

The next two sections of the exhibition occupy the sumptuous assembly hall, designed to host the Banca Nazionale del Regno d’Italia shareholders’ meetings. It is covered by a wooden ceiling punctuated by twenty-seven coffers decorated with lilies, the city’s emblem, from which hangs a rich chandelier in Murano glass made in 1962.A radical updating of the figurative language, transformed as much in...

The elegant first floor foyer appears at the top of the staircase with its ceiling decorations by the Bologna ornamentalist Luigi Samoggia. The grisaille technique makes the painted figures seem like sculptures, symbolising science, art and literature. Our visit continues under the gaze of these figures. The domestic context is the preferred place of Macchiaiola portraiture, with the female figure...

We move on from the Donatello foyer to the monumental staircase. The spiral staircase, with its 108 stairs, seems to lightly float in space, occupying a stairwell a good twenty-four metres high and brought to life by the light shining from the oval skylight in the ceiling. This space hosts the Black Angel, one of the rare surviving works by the sculptor Maryla Lednicka-Szczytt. Shown for the first...

After the broad entrance foyer, enhanced by its statue of Cavour by Augusto Rivalta, we go into the Donatello foyer. The vault seems to open up onto an angle of sky, where some cherubs are crowning the Savoy coat of arms. They are surrounded by a triumph of decorations, with leaves, masks and figures of virtue. The hall containing the first section of the exhibition owes its name to the two, ninet...

It is 14 May 1865 and the celebrations for the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth are being held in Florence, which had become the capital of the Kingdom of Italy a few months before. This was actually the first big national celebration, dedicated to the poet and “literary” father of united Italy and took place in the presence of King Vittorio Emanuele II. That event also led to the sanctioning of F...

Welcome to the Florence branch of the Banca d’Italia. The palazzo was built between 1865 and 1869 to a design by the Neapolitan architect Antonio Cipolla and expresses the new “Italian style”, combining the splendours of the Renaissance of the facade with the emerging Art Nouveau in some interior areas. A bridge between past and present, with Florence at the centre: the new capital of united Italy...