The enchantment of the landscape: an exhibition on the landscape between the 19th and 20th centuries in Rancate

The Giovanni Züst Cantonal Art Gallery in Rancate hosts from November 13, 2021 to November 25, 2022 the exhibition The Enchantment of Landscape. Drawing, Art, Technology. Naturalists, geographers, art historians in Ticino in the near past.

Between the mid-19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the territory of Canton Ticino was gradually discovered and described by many naturalists and men of science, geographers, photographers, painters, and art historians: they traversed and analyzed, both with the scientific tools and through the technical tools proper to their time and craft (drawing, morphological survey, engraving, photography, oil painting...) the country in which they lived and worked.

This exhibition aims to illustrate the efforts and techniques used by those who, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, looked at and interpreted their territory with new eyes and new tools of investigation. Thus were born the first cartographic elaborations, the Dufour and Siegfried topographic maps.

Some time later they worked on an initial cataloguing of the most significant monuments existing in the territory, under the impetus of the father of Helvetic artistic historiography, Johann Rudolf Rahn, assisted by his assistant, the architect Hermann Fietz, whose drawings are exhibited, who illustrated and surveyed with objectivity and precision not only the major monuments, but also the context and landscape that accommodated them.

With equal acuity also operated the early naturalists (among all, one cannot fail to mention Luigi Lavizzari, a man of science but also a politician) who carefully described the components of the natural landscape by collecting and cataloguing the most diverse materials.

Finally, some particularly significant aspects of the Ticino territory are represented through the eyes of painters, who interpreted and gave new meaning to these landscapes: from the most famous Fontanesi, Luigi Rossi, Berta, Franzoni, Longoni, to the lesser-known Zaccheo, Patocchi, Regina Conti, Maccagni, and Buzzi. Closing the exhibition is a look, inevitable, at the future. A station presents never-before-seen drone shots and their processing through a 3-D model.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Giovanni Züst Cantonal Art Gallery.

Pictured: Carlo Bossoli, Wheat Bank (1849; tempera on paper, 49 x 68 cm; Lugano, Museo d’Arte della Svizzera italiana)

The enchantment of the landscape Drawing, art, technology Naturalists, geographers, art historians in Ticino in the near past

The enchantment of the landscape: an exhibition on the landscape between the 19th and 20th centuries in Rancate

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