Lorenzo Viani's Sant'Andrea on the move from Viareggio to Lucca for dedicated exhibition

Moving some 20 kilometers for a significant work by Lorenzo Viani (Viareggio, 1882 - Lido di Ostia, 1936), the St. Andrew at the Viareggio Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art . GaMC’s work is in fact going to Lucca, to the Church of San Franceschetto (exhibition venue of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca) where from April 22 to May 28, 2023 it is the focus of the exhibition La chiesa, i borghesi, il popolo. Lorenzo Viani’s Sant’Andrea, organized by the City of Viareggio and the Foundation itself with the idea of remembering Viani’s Lucchese roots. In fact, his parents, Rinaldo and Emilia, were from Lucca, and they moved to Versilia in the service of the Bourbons in the Royal Palace on the Viale dei Tigli between the Viareggio docks and Torre del Lago. Lucchesi also the beginnings of his artistic training, since the artist, one of the greatest in early 20th century European art, was directed by Plinio Nomellini to the city’s Institute of Fine Arts. And finally the epilogue of his extraordinary parabola as an author, writer, thinker and man, when illness led him to Maggiano’s, where he portrayed the unfortunate population of the asylum.

The exhibition is part of the journey that began with the exhibition hosted in 2022 at the Villa Paolina in Viareggio, based on Viani’s national and international promotion of the figure of Percy Bysshe Shelley on the bicentenary of the poet’s death. A cultural program continued, also in 2022, with the publication of excerpts from the Viareggio author’s book, The Cypress and the Vine, and in 2023 with an enhancement of his own artistic production, through the exhibition at the D’Annunzio Vittoriale degli Italiani and through this ’foray’ of the Sant’Andrea in San Franceschetto.

The work depicts the church of Sant’Andrea, a historic building of ancient Viareggio, the “fishermen’s church” that logically held a very specific role in the local imagination. In this context Viani sets a canovaccio of everyday life, in which the crisp white of the façade serves as a backdrop for the encounter of the varied humanity (the bourgeoisie and the populace precisely) that was often the object of the artist’s attentions, here depicted in a ruthless, caricatured and almost tasteful contrast between lavish wealth and battered poverty.

“A century ago,” Viani recalled in an article published in Corriere della Sera on November 27, 1934 (entitled La benedizione dell’ultimo rombo), “the placid sea broke a hundred meters from the steps of the church of Sant’Andrea that the people of Viareggio, then composed only of fishermen, saw built to provide for the spiritual needs of the ever-growing population of the town, raised to the dignity of a city by the august Maria Luisa of Bourbon shortly before she was buried at Escuriale. In those days, from the threshold of the temple, below the beautiful colonnade of the Doric order leaning against the wall and supporting a triangular pediment, resting on three rectangular bays, - those on the sides supported two large amphorae with symbolic faci, and the one in the middle a triumphal statue of the saint, - with a single turn of the eyes one could overlook the open sea. The bare sides of the temple and the terminal wall of the monastery, on stormy days, dammed up the raging waves, freeing the town spiked there after with its hovels, its vegetable gardens, and the windrows of its fishing goiters.”

The exhibition, with free admission, will be open from April 22 to May 28 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with hours 10am-7pm. Special openings on April 24 and 25. Info: www.fondazionecarilucca.it

Lorenzo Viani's Sant'Andrea on the move from Viareggio to Lucca for dedicated exhibition

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