Felicissimo Giani: exhibition on Felice Giani in Bologna 200 years after his death

Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna celebrates the 200th anniversary of the death of Felice Giani (San Sebastiano Curone, 1758 - Rome, 1823). It does so with the exhibition Felicissimo Giani, curated by Tommaso Pasquali, scheduled from December 2, 2023 to February 25, 2024: a monographic excursus dedicated to the great painter and decorator, a highly original protagonist of Italian Neoclassicism, which restores the vitality and ’imaginative’ force disseminated by the author not only in his boundless graphic production, but also in his interventions on walls and ceilings, with which he was able to interpret the cultural ambitions of the emerging classes of the Napoleonic era, who called him to work in the palaces of Rome, Faenza and Bologna.

Felice Giani, considered in the past in fact as an extraordinary anticipator of French Romanticism, or as a restless spirit, close to the sulfurous and tempestuous moods of Füssli’s Roman circle, is an artist particularly dear to Palazzo Bentivoglio, which preserves several of his works in its permanent collection. Prominent among Giani’s works on display are two rare tempera paintings (until now considered lost and recently rediscovered) made by the Piedmontese artist on the ceiling of a dining room in Palazzo Bentivoglio, entirely decorated by the painter in 1810 with his collaborator Gaetano Bertolani. These are two roundels depicting a Triumph of Bacchus and a Triumph of Cybele, currently in a private collection, which almost a century later return to view inside the palace.

As is usual for Palazzo Bentivoglio initiatives, the selection of the works on display was made from a small nucleus of Giani’s works belonging to the permanent collection, some of which were previously unpublished or never exhibited. A series of important loans, from private as well as public, Italian and foreign institutions, then allows a necessarily partial but compelling parable to be traced through the artist’s diverse activity, spanning four decades.

The itinerary, which includes 44 works, unfolds through the three main rooms of the exhibition space, which counts on a set-up by architect and designer Franco Raggi, conceived as a continuous background: one of gold with the task of transforming the white exhibition walls and extending even on the ancient brick walls; the other blue and material, made of felt, on which the works see their chromatic qualities enhanced.

In the first room, the early experiments are introduced by the small Self-portrait on paper from 1778, which gives us an image of the 20-year-old artist as a disheveled, bohemian student at the Bologna Academy, where he had arrived the previous year. The years of his training, spent precisely between Bologna and Rome, are sketched by drawings derived from classical antiquities, never slavishly reproduced but reinvented with personal gesture, and by works copied or inspired by the great examples of Italian painting of previous centuries, a continuous reservoir of inventions to which Giani would often resort to counterbalance in terms of vitality and dynamism the more controlled patterns envisaged by the taste of his time. The first decisive Faenza commissions are illustrated by preparatory sketches for the Galleria dei Cento Pacifici (1786-1787) and for the Galleria di Fetonte a Palazzo Conti (1787): two rare tempera paintings on canvas from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, restored for the occasion with the support of Palazzo Bentivoglio, which show the peculiar reinterpretation of pictorialism and gracefulness of Gandolfiana’s matrix. The large sheet depicting a Bacchanal with Dante and Beatrice (1791) testifies to the irreverent force with which the artist participated in a crucial moment of revival of Dante’s fortunes, allowing us to evoke the intellectual milieu of the Accademia dei Pensieri, informally established by Giani in his Roman home and frequented by a cultured and cosmopolitan circle of artists.

The second room is entirely devoted to the landscape genre, where the juxtaposition occurs between ideal views, such as those with Apollo and Marsyas and the Temple of Venus at Lesbos, and the unexpected pre-Romantic vision of Landscape with Dante and Virgil, while the extraordinary quality graphic of Simplon Pass, captured on paper with quick ink strokes in October 1812, tells of a stop on the way to Paris, where Giani worked on the decorations of Villa Aldini in Montmorency, later translating it into a famous series of views.

Finally, in the long sleeve of the third room, the artist’s orientations after the turn of the century are evoked, alluding to the successes of his work as a decorator with works such as the two preparatory gouaches for the Aeneas Room at Palazzo Marescalchi in Bologna (a project coeval with the 1810 Palazzo Bentivoglio room), which best expresses Giani’s interest in a total and systematic decoration of the rooms where he and his team intervened. A curious pendant of folios dedicated to Rinaldo and Armida and Aeneas and Dido reports Giani’s interest in literary sources even in the last two decades of his life, while precious canvases such as the Rape of Ganymede, the neo-Raphaelite Holy Family with Saints John, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and the powerful invention of Saints Vitale and Clement interceding with the Virgin for the cessation of the pestilence (Milan, Walter Padovani) tell of his attraction to the exploration and reinterpretation of the modules provided by Italian painting between Modern Mannerism and Baroque. Paying homage to a “warm,” combinatorial and paradoxically anti-classical notion of neoclassicism, as was Felice Giani’s, four contemporary works - by Flavio Favelli, Franco Raggi, Pablo Bronstein and Luigi Ontani - are included along the exhibition’s itinerary, to be understood as ’neo-neoclassical’ counterpoints that, on a formal or conceptual level, help to better illuminate certain aspects of the works on display.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with images and cards of all the works on display, published by CURA, which will be presented on Friday, December 15 at 6 p.m. in the presence of the authors of the essays at Palazzo Marescalchi, another fine example of Giani’s decorative intervention.

Opening hours: Saturdays Sundays, Dec. 8 and 31, 2023, and Jan. 1 and 2, 2024, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed on December 23 and 24, 2023.

Viewing of the dining room with Felice Giani’s decorations in Palazzo Bentivoglio is possible only during guided tours. Guided tours: 6 to 7 p.m. on Fridays Dec. 15 and 22; Jan. 12-19-26, 2024; Feb. 9-16-23, 2024 by reservation on eventbrite. Groups already organized can also make reservations on days other than those on the calendar. For info and reservations: +39 370 1249962, info@palazzobentivoglio.org

Statement

“A bold choice for the layout,” explains Franco Raggi, “A soft and unusual wall to hang paintings but just right to accentuate with matter and color the continuous ribbon of the path. To mark the ends of the blue bands I put red ”zig-zag“ stitching, my personal memory of the edges of a felt armchair by Rietveld whose edges I have always loved.”

“Like the ”two-faced Janus,“ the Roman god of doors and passages, this protagonist of Italian Neoclassicism was able to look both ahead and behind him at the same time, holding together an enthralling love for the art of the past and a prophetic ability to anticipate new tensions,” , says Tommaso Pasquali curator of the exhibition, who points out that: “Giani knew how to be neoclassical and anticlassical, neo-Mannerist and pre-Romantic, academic and antiacademic, copyist from the ancient and enemy of philological precisions, whimsical genius and interpreter of the Napoleonic elites. With his gradual rediscovery-from a 1950 paper by Roberto Longhi to the 1999 monograph by Anna Ottani Cavina-Giani has forced modern studies to confront a complex artistic vicissitude and overflowing production that eludes easy categorization.”

Felicissimo Giani: exhibition on Felice Giani in Bologna 200 years after his death

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