Pitti Palace Gallery of Modern Art acquires a painting by Vittorio Corcos, "Stella and Piero"

A new acquisition for the Uffizi Galleries: it is Stella e Piero, a painting by Vittorio Matteo Corcos (Livorno, 1859 - Florence, 1933), which has been destined for the Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti (which after the Franceschini reform became part of the museum pole led by the Uffizi), where it is already on display (specifically in room 20). The two protagonists are two young people depicted in a rural setting: Stella, the girl, is slightly embarrassed as she looks toward the viewer, while Piero, on the contrary, lies behind her laughing and joking. In this work, the presentation reads, “the skill of the artist emerges, who seems to have established a direct relationship with Stella, and who, with the same attention that he devotes to the shiny furnishings of wealthy ladies, restores to us the girl’s world in all its authenticity. She investigates the cracks in the wall in the background and narrates the rough canvas of the now-tight corset and the red-flowered cottonine apron. Stella, with her beautiful young skin flushed by the air and the sun, looks at us with deep blue eyes: her melancholy reluctance is a far cry from the malice almost always present in the gazes of the provocative fashionable ladies Corcos used to portray, but it also distances her from the mischievous Piero who, lying on the retaining wall that acts as her backboard, amuses himself by annoying her with the strands of straw.”

Corcos, a master of the mundane portrait, was the author of realistic and highly refined paintings: most famous are his elegant female portraits, from which a remarkable attention to detail is evident. Moreover, these details were a source of inspiration for a model of femininity that would have important success in the first half of the twentieth century (think, for example, of advertisements). The painting that has arrived at Palazzo Pitti allows the museum’s collection to expand with a work that testifies to another of Corcos’ interests, that of documenting the small things of nature in everyday scenes: an area in which the painter confronted research influenced by the literature of French naturalism.

“The museum’s collections continue to grow,” emphasizes the Director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike D. Schmidt, "not only through gifts-such as the spectacular painting Portrait of a Lady in a Garden by Silvestro Lega, presented three months ago-but also through shrewd acquisitions, which complement the collections with works that open new perspectives on art history and the history of the 19th and 20th centuries itself. The newly purchased painting bears witness to perhaps forgotten aspects of the life and work of that period, and also makes us reflect on a form of typically Tuscan craftsmanship, that of woven straw, which must be preserved in our intangible heritage."

Image: Vittorio Corcos, Stella and Piero (1889; oil on canvas, 112 x 86.5 cm; Florence, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti)

Pitti Palace Gallery of Modern Art acquires a painting by Vittorio Corcos, "Stella and Piero"

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