From Fattori to Rodin, Dante according to Symbolist painting on display at the Bargello in Florence

The National Museum of the Bargello in Florence is hosting, from September 23, 2021 to January 9, 2022, the exhibition La mirabile visione. Dante and the Comedy in the Symbolist Imaginary, another event the museum dedicates to the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s passing after the summer exhibition Honorable and Ancient Citizen of Florence. The Bargello for Dante. This time the exhibition, curated by Ilaria Ciseri and Carlo Sisi, aims to investigate the complex perception of the figure of Dante and the Divine Comedy in the artistic and literary context between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Produced with the contribution and patronage of the National Committee for the Celebration of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the patronage of the “700 Dante” Committee coordinated by the City of Florence and the contribution of Fondazione CR Firenze, the exhibition presents a selection of works (fifty-seven in all) that, from naturalist currents to the European influences of Symbolism, illustrate the extraordinary catalog of images that Dante’s poem was able to offer the art world. The exhibition is conceived as a thematic and interdisciplinary narrative, within which the works form a path through paintings, sculptures, prints, engravings, photographs, and conceptual and literary references implicit in Dante’s biographical and poetic story, with loans from museums, libraries, and international cultural institutes (including the Muséand d’Orsay, the Musée Rodin, the Museo del Prado, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Uffizi Galleries, the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea - Museo dell’Ottocento in Ferrara, and the Museo Etrusco di Villa Giulia) as well as from some important private collections.

After the mid-19th century, on the eve of Dante’s centenary that was celebrated in 1865, the figure of Dante became increasingly identified with the national idea sanctioned by the outcomes of the politics of the Risorgimento, whereby Dante was recognized as a forerunner of the unification of Italy and as such was represented in the official monuments that began to populate Italian piazzas, such as that of Santa Croce in Florence. A culmination of sentiments that would shortly thereafter fragment into a variety of experiments fueled by the lively dialectic between naturalist currents and the European influences of Symbolism, the latter being more inclined to find in the Comedy the matrices of themodern disquiet, the cues to transfer into contemporary sensibility the extraordinary catalog of images (troubled, sublime, mystical, dreamlike), which Dante’s poem was able to offer the art world.

The taste and thought of the Pre-Raphaelites will turn above all to the facts of the poet’s life, with the intention of embodying the medieval dream in the representation of an exemplary biographical event, also for the aesthetic suggestions that in those years were being pointed out as a model for the life of contemporary man. Dante Gabriel Rossetti remains the pivotal point of the renewed perception of a non-philological, but aesthetic Middle Ages whose representation will tend to emphasize the refined evocation of places, costumes, and furnishings, components that will become dominant in the works of Anglo-Saxon painters enraptured in the Florentine “dream.” On the same plane of prevailing aestheticizing orientation are to be placed the affections of Italian artists (Duprè, Cassioli, Ranzoni, Faruffini, Barabino, Sartorio, Sorbi, Trentacoste) who approached the life of Dante and his Commedia, accentuating the lyrical imagination that found nourishment precisely in the close dialogue between figurative art and literature. The episode of Paolo and Francesca constitutes, for example, a paradigm of that expressive harmony such as can be seen in the works of Gustave Dorè, Auguste Rodin, and Gaetano Previati: an essential but significant anthology of the fortune of a theme, crimen amoris, amplified by Gabriele d’Annunzio’s tragedy and Riccardo Zandonai’s music.

The title, La mirabile visione, refers to Giovanni Pascoli’s studies of Dante, for a tour itinerary that is divided into several sections, respectively devoted to the discovery of the oldest portrait of Dante, by Giotto, in the Bargello chapel (1840), to the reception of the Vita Nova in the second half of the19th century, the great and tragic characters of the Comedy represented in the international artistic sphere, the works presented at the 1901 Alinari Competition and the illustrations most akin to the Symbolist sensibility, and also the resonance of the Comedy in the literary production of Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Among the works on display are masterpieces by artists such as Giovanni Duprè, Amos Cassioli, Gustave Doré, Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Plinio Nomellini, Giovanni Fattori, Federico Faruffini and many others. The itinerary also focuses on two major publishing enterprises: the Alinari Competition for the illustration of the Divine Comedy in 1900 in which Giovanni Fattori, Galileo Chini and Plinio Nomellini, among others, participated, and the edition of the Comedy published in 1911 by Leo S. Olschki. The former convened artists around the illustration of the poem with results consistent with the contemporary Symbolist temperament (the works of the thirty-one participating artists, including Alberto Martini, Galileo Chini, Duilio Cambellotti, Adolfo De Carolis, Giovanni Fattori, and Alberto Zardo, were exhibited, in June 1901, in the premises of the Società Florentine Society of Fine Arts and it was clear to all how they constituted a significant review of the artistic expressions present in Italy in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the added advantage of seeing them soon reunited, after being translated into callotypes and autotypes, in the three prestigious volumes that saw the light between 1902 and 1903), the second, defined as “monumental,” saw Gabriele D’Annunzio called upon to write the introduction to the precious volume.

At the close of the 19th century, the celebrations called to commemorate the VI centenary of Alighieri’s election as Prior of the Arts in the government of the Florentine Republic were the occasion, as we have seen, of important initiatives related to the fate of Dante’s fortunes: in April 1899 the Executive Commission of the Società Dantesca Italiana resumed the Lectura Dantis in Orsanmichele, while, on the threshold of the new century, the same influential association would entrust the fate of that ’literary springtime’ to the imaginative vein of Gabriele D’Annunzio, a valuable commentator on Canto VIII of the Inferno, and who would be prefaced, in 1911, by the sumptuous edition of the Commedia published by Leo Samuel Olschki.

Also among the works on display is the unique portrait of the poet (a copy of Giotto’s fresco in the Magdalene Chapel) created in pencil on the back cover of an ancient edition of the Convivio by Englishman Seymour Kirkup. The exhibition closes with a strong evocation of Arnold Böcklin’sIsle of the Dead, present in Otto Vermehren’s faithful copy, and with the projection of a video offering a selection from the 1911 film Inferno, made ad hoc by Francesco Galluzzi and Federico Bucalossi. In addition, to enable even the youngest audience to understand the figure of Dante and his relationship with Florence, the free Dante for All workshops dedicated to children and young people (which had started, with great success, on the occasion of the previous exhibition Honorable and Ancient Citizen of Florence. The Bargello for Dante) made possible thanks to the contribution of the Fondazione CR Firenze.

"The Marvelous Vision. Dante and the Comedy in the Symbolist Imaginary, the second exhibition organized by the Bargello Museums on the occasion of the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death, completes the annual program dedicated to the inseparable relationship between the Poet and the Bargello, Dante’s place par excellence in Florence and Europe even in the 19th century," comments Paola D’Agostino, director of the Bargello Museums. “Absolutely original in the choice of works by Carlo Sisi, assisted by Ilaria Ciseri, and aided by a Scientific Committee also composed of Emanuele Bardazzi, Flavio Fergonzi and Laura Melosi, this exhibition is once again the result of collaboration between different institutions and scholars, to whom I am deeply grateful for their commitment in such an extraordinary year for everyone.”

“A never-before-seen journey in the figure of Dante through the centuries, thanks to a very rich selection of works from very important international cultural institutions,” explains Tommaso Sacchi, the councilor for culture of the City of Florence. “On the 700th anniversary of the death of the Supreme Poet, the Bargello returns to prominence with an exhibition of the highest level, confirming itself as a crucial junction in Dante’s itinerary in the city.”

“Fondazione CR Firenze,” says its president Luigi Salvadori, “continues, also with this exhibition, the positive experience of the ”Dante for All“ program by offering children and young people aged 7 to 13 free workshops, designed by a team of specialized mediators, to accompany them in understanding the many contents of the exhibition. In the previous exhibition, more than 70 activities were held in which 570 children residing in the Florence area participated together with their families, 10 percent of whom were foreigners with second-generation immigrant children. At the same time, a monitoring and audience analysis activity dedicated also to accompanying adults was initiated. Of the latter, 41.8% said they had visited the Bargello Museum for the first time, precisely on the occasion of the educational offerings. So art calls for art.”

“The idea of the exhibition,” says curator Carlo Sisi, “is aimed at illustrating, with appropriately selected works, the figurative interpretation of the Vita Nova and the Comedy that in the season of theSymbolist aesthetics extracted strongly evocative visions from those pages, putting before the Romantic dramaturgies the new poetics of ’states of mind,’ that is, the evasions of aestheticism as well as the restlessness that matured in the broad crucible of artistic and literary culture at the end of the century.”

“The exhibition,” explains curator Ilaria Ciseri, “sees the history of the Bargello, understood as a palace, before even as a museum, merge with the artistic and literary scene, Italian and international, of the mid-nineteenth century. From the discovery of the face of young Dante in 1840, painted by Giotto in the building’s chapel but whose traces had been lost for centuries, sprang an unprecedented Dante iconography destined for unstoppable fortune.”

The Admirable Vision. Dante and the Comedy in the Symbolist Imaginary was also made possible thanks to contributions made through Art Bonus to the Bargello National Museum in Dante’s year. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Firenze Musei. The scientific project is by Carlo Sisi, who, together with the scientific committee - consisting of Emanuele Bardazzi, Ilaria Ciseri, Flavio Fergonzi, Laura Melosi - edited the exhibition catalog published by Polistampa. For information visit the Bargello Museums website.

Pictured: Otto Vermehren, The Island of the Dead (1886-1900; oil on canvas; Private collection)

From Fattori to Rodin, Dante according to Symbolist painting on display at the Bargello in Florence

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