Florence, Pitti Palace hosts first monographic exhibition on Giuseppe Bezzuoli

The first monographic exhibition dedicated to Giuseppe Bezzuoli (Florence, 1784 - 1855): opened in the halls of the Palazzina della Meridiana in the Pitti Palace in Florence and runs from March 29 to June 5. The exhibition, dedicated to one of the great protagonists of early 19th century art, curated by Vanessa Gavioli, Elena Marconi and Ettore Spalletti, and entitled Giuseppe Bezzuoli. A Great Protagonist of Romantic Painting, presents more than 130 paintings, sculptures and drawings chronicling Bezzuoli’s career and the art of his time. There are also many loans from Italian and foreign museums and collections.

The itinerary starts from the painter’s neoclassical beginnings to his full maturity, when at the height of his fame he created some masterpieces of great Italian Romantic painting: theEntrance of Charles VIII to Florence, The Repudiation of Hagar,Eve Tempted by the Serpent (the latter two paintings are recent acquisitions by the Uffizi for the Gallery of Modern Art). These are joined by a sensational parade of portraits of society contemporary to the painter: a cross-section of the national and international nobility and upper middle class. The exhibition also makes it possible to compare Bezzuoli’s artistic production with that of other important masters such as Francesco Hayez and Massimo D’Azeglio, and offers visitors an opportunity to admire the works of the leading exponents of cosmopolitan art and culture in early 19th-century Florence: Frenchman Ingres, who was active in the city at the same time as Bezzuoli; sculptors Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers; and Thomas Cole, a sublime exponent of the Hudson River School: the latter in a section devoted to young American artists who attended Giuseppe Bezzuoli’s painting classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, which counted Giovanni Fattori among its most celebrated pupils.

The exhibition is divided into nine sections. The first and second are devoted to the Florentine context in the early 19th century and to the painter’s beginnings. The international taste and culture established in the Tuscan capital around the 1920s and 1930s coincided with the maturation of our artist, a theme addressed in the third section. Further insights will concern Giuseppe Bezzuoli’s teaching of young American artists during their study stay in Florence. The fourth section is devoted to portraiture, a field in which Bezzuoli quickly established himself as an absolute master. The public will find itself immersed in a crowd of the cultural protagonists of the time, dressed in their most elegant mises: entire families, ladies with complicated hairstyles wrapped in rustling robes; gentlemen clutched in jackets crammed with decorations, aggrandized intellectuals and statesmen understood of their role.

The central part of the exhibition (sections five and six), on the other hand, focuses on Bezzuoli’s activity as a painter of historical subjects, executed for illustrious patrons including Grand Duke Leopold II and Russian Prince Anatolij Demidov, and on the undertaking of the great mural cycles frescoed in the exhibition rooms at Palazzo Pitti. The seventh section, on the other hand, deals with sacred painting, represented in the exhibition by the large altarpieces created for important churches in the Florentine area, such as the Basilica of Santa Croce. The eighth section displays paintings from the artist’s late activity, mainly of biblical subjects, a genre that allowed him a wide treatment of the nude, especially female. Finally, the ninth section is devoted to the graphic activity of Bezzuoli, a draftsman of undisputed talent and an extraordinary interpreter of literary subjects. This section, consisting mainly of the rich fund of the Uffizi Galleries, with additions of different provenance, investigates the artist’s modus operandi: literary sources (Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, Jean Racine, Alessandro Manzoni) were used by him to illustrate on paper passages that document an activity of the highest intellectual depth, revealed for the first time. Also on display here will be some interesting notebooks, in which the figurative part is often associated with annotations that testify, among other things, to the high profile of Bezzuoli’s artistic teaching, carried out for four decades at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. The exhibition is accompanied by a Giunti Editore catalog.

“Put finally in the full light, the figure of Bezzuoli now stands out in the quivering artistic and intellectual landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and beyond: the artist is revealed as a true pictor doctus, who knew and loved literature, his continual source of inspiration,” emphasizes the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt. “The sensational aspect of the exhibition-in addition to its scientific merits-is its setting: some of the rooms in the itinerary were even decorated by Bezzuoli for the grand duke. The visitor is thus transported to a perfect setting where the artist and his contemporaries are brought to life amid the silks of the tapestries and the furniture of the period, as in a theatrical set where, however, everything is wonderfully real.”

Giuseppe Bezzuoli was born in Florence on November 28, 1784. In his younger years he attended the Academy of Fine Arts under Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Desmarais and Pietro Benvenuti, and soon won important awards: in 1801 he received the prize in the annual competition for the “Academy of drawn nudes,” and in 1812 his painting Ajax defending the body of Patroclus was the winner at the Academy’s Triennial Exhibition. In 1815 he painted his masterpiece, Francesca da Rimini, now lost, commissioned the year before by Count Saulo Alari of Milan. Travels between Milan, Bologna and the Veneto in the following years not only extended his contacts but also further enriched his figurative culture, which was expressed at the highest level in one of the most significant and famous paintings of his career: the Baptism of Clovis, from 1821. The latter was followed by other works that were greatly appreciated both by the public and by Grand Duke Leopold II of Lorraine, for whom between 1827 and 1829 he executed the great historical painting with The Entry of Charles VIII. In the face of gradually increasing success in Florence and also in Milan, Bezzuoli’s painting also experienced great fortune in the following decades at the international level, evidenced by the fact that the artist received commissions from collectors from different areas in Europe and beyond (England, the United States of America, Lithuania, Russia). Bezzuoli died on the evening of September 14, 1855.

Florence, Pitti Palace hosts first monographic exhibition on Giuseppe Bezzuoli

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