Giuseppe Mentessi, artist of feeling, on display in Ferrara

The art of Giuseppe Mentessi (Ferrara, 1857 - Milan, 1931) is featured in an exhibition scheduled at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara (Palazzo dei Diamanti) from March 10 to June 10, 2018: Giuseppe Mentessi. (1857 - 1931). Artist of Feeling in fact intends to investigate the representation of feelings in painting with the paintings and drawings of a great artist, among the most important figures of the moment of transition from verism to symbolism.

The exhibition, curated by Marcello Toffanello focuses particularly on the period from 1890 to 1909, that is, the central and most significant period of Giuseppe Mentessi’s career. The itinerary begins by investigating the works with a social theme (such as Visione triste, Ora triste and Ramingo, exhibited together with the preparatory drawings), in which, however, the desire to detach himself from a naturalistic representation of reality in order to transfigure the latter in a symbolic key is evident: Visione triste, which aims to denounce the situation of the peasants of the Po Valley, becomes a sort of religious allegory, a “peasant calvary,” as explained in the presentation of the exhibition. Moreover, the sketch executed for the work is shown to the public for the first time.

The exhibition then continues with works imbued with mysticism, such as Ramingo, from the MASI - Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1909: a work that “reveals how the silent dialogue between the poor pilgrim and the suffering Christ is the result of a rethinking in a symbolist and religious key of an initial idea for the work, depicting a mother with child.” Also on display are preparatory drawings, revealing Giuseppe Mentessi’s solid academic training.

Closing the itinerary is a selection of drawings from the Mentessi fund in the AssiCoop collection, joined by several notebook sheets with annotations and sketches that testify to the Ferrara painter’s intense artistic activity.

"The exhibition Giuseppe Mentessi (1857 - 1931). Artist of Feeling," says Martina Bagnoli, director of the Estensi Galleries, of which the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara is a part, “inaugurates a new season at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara. When the exhibition closes, the three rooms temporarily housing the works of Giuseppe Mentessi, completely renovated and equipped with air conditioning systems suitable for the conservation of ancient paintings, will in fact return to house the museum’s permanent collections, and in particular paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As of now, however, visitors to the exhibition will be able to appreciate the museographic modernization work accomplished on the three rooms, which have been equipped with new colors on the walls, new captions and a new lighting system. In the following months, this work will continue until it covers all the exhibition rooms of the Pinacoteca to conform to the objectives that were set last year with the technological adaptation and scientific rearrangement of the 16th-century wing on Corso Biagio Rossetti.”

“While participating in the restlessness and formal experimentation of the turn of the century, unlike Previati-in whom Boccioni and the Futurists recognized a precursor of their own formal research-Mentessi,” the curator writes in the catalog, “remained fundamentally foreign to the suggestions of European symbolism, never adopted never a fully pointillist technique and did not seek an abstract synthesis of the image, continuing to practice the art of painting and drawing according to the traditional fundamentals of the craft, remaining, even in the new century, in the long groove of nineteenth-century naturalism. In the distance, Previati’s arduous search for a new form of expression was picked up by the next generation, which made him one of its masters, while Mentessi’s modest fortune, so understood within the limits of the culture that expressed it, vanished with it.”

The exhibition is open daily Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Closed Mondays. Tickets (valid for admission to the National Picture Gallery) cost 6 euros full and 3 euros reduced. Free for all EU citizens under 18. For more info visit the National Art Gallery website.

Pictured: Giuseppe Mentessi, Visione triste (1899; tempera and pastel on plasterboard, 139 x 238 cm; Venice, Galleria Internazionale di Ca’ Pesaro). 2018 © Photographic Archives - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

Giuseppe Mentessi, artist of feeling, on display in Ferrara

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