Mart in Rovereto hosts the largest exhibition dedicated to Pietro Gaudenzi

Until September 1, 2024, the Mart in Rovereto presents the largest exhibition ever organized on Pietro Gaudenzi (Genoa, 1880 - Anticoli Corrado, 1955), among the most highly regarded painters of his time. Titled Pietro Gaudenzi. The Virtue of Women, from an idea by Vittorio Sgarbi and curated by Manuel Carrera and Alessandra Tiddia, the exhibition aims to offer an exhaustive look at the artist’s artistic journey through a selection of oil paintings and works on paper from institutions and prestigious private collections.

Long forgotten by art-historical literature, despite his wide participation in major exhibition events between the two wars, Gaudenzi is now the focus of growing interest among scholars: with a monographic slant, unraveled through thematic sections, the exhibition is intended as a first reconnaissance of the painter’s oeuvre, necessary for a better understanding of his rediscovery. The Mart presents all together for the first time works from public and private collections, including nine works from the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. The large Baptism from 1932 and the Portrait of Guido Rossi (1925), among Gaudenzi’s major patrons, also belong to this generous loan.

Prominent among the exhibition’s rarities is La mia scuola di Napoli (My School in Naples), a circa 1938 canvas never before exhibited in a public museum. The painting depicts Gaudenzi’s studio at the time he was teaching painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and also represents one of his rare nudes.

Divided into five sections devoted respectively to the painting of the affections, sacred art, the Milanese period, and painting technique, the exhibition concludes with a review of colored drawings referring to the cycle of frescoes for the Castle of the Knights of Rhodes.

From his formative years between La Spezia, Genoa and Rome to his retirement, in maturity, to the village of Anticoli Corrado, Pietro Gaudenzi always remained faithful to a realist figuration, foreign to the formalisms of the avant-garde. Through the search for a direct confrontation with ancient painting, reread through the filter of a twentieth-century sensibility, Gaudenzi tackled in his compositions the major themes of the tradition: portraits, scenes of domestic intimacy, maternity, still lifes and, only rarely, landscapes. The absolute protagonists of Gaudenzi’s visual universe are the members of his family: his first wife, Candida Toppi, who died prematurely in 1920, their children and those from his second marriage to his sister-in-law Augusta Toppi. Understandably, the death of the first spouse indelibly marked the painter’s life, influencing his production and choice of themes. After ’20 Gaudenzi explored sacred themes and religious painting more frequently.

The appreciation shown to him by the highest offices of the state during the Fascist twenty-year period (in 1936 he won the Mussolini Prize, in 1939 he was named an Academician of Italy, in 1940 the Cremona Prize, in 1942 the Duce commissioned a portrait) cost him oblivion after the end of World War II.

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Mart in Rovereto hosts the largest exhibition dedicated to Pietro Gaudenzi

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