A new exhibit for Correggio at the Pilotta in Parma. Starting in the fall

Entitled The Nineteenth Century and the Myth of Correggio, the exhibition that will occupy the exhibition spaces of the new Pilotta in Parma for an entire year, from October 3, 2020 to October 3, 2021, and which in fact also stands as the basis for the remounting of the section of the National Gallery dedicated to Correggio (Antonio Allegri; Correggio, c. 1489 - 1534). The exhibition will in fact be housed in the rooms of the Rocchetta, a space that is very important from a historical point of view but difficult to musealize. It is one of the most beautiful in the Galleria Nazionale di Parma: it houses Correggio’s celebrated altarpieces, in a historicized and consequently immovable setting. It is, however, the end of the Gallery’s itinerary, and consequently it is chronologically decontextualized from the rest of the Gallery (the 18th-century works, for example, are displayed in the halls of the Accademia). The exhibition thus launches the Rocchetta’s remounting operations.

In fact, by a precise strategic choice of director Simone Verde, this exhibition, after the long exhibition period will become the definitive section of the great picture gallery of the Nuova Pilotta. On the walls will remain the works with their related exhibition panels, while the extensive in-depth and comparative documentary material proposed by the temporary exhibition will remain documented by the exhibition’s scientific catalog.

There has always been a problem about how to justify the placement of the Correggio in the Rocchetta, “which this installation believes it has finally solved,” a note from the museum explains: "the Correggio in these spaces is in fact not a fully Renaissance Correggio, but reinvented from the 19th century, for the use of the copyists of the Accademia. Taken down from the altars of the churches in which he stood, he is a now bourgeois master whom the visitor finds set up at eye level for a face-to-face dialogue. To explain the meaning of this cultural upheaval, a recomprehensive itinerary was therefore created, typical of a contemporary museum that is simultaneously required to narrate the history of art and that of the collections. With The Nineteenth Century and the Myth of Correggio, therefore, the visitor will find explained the meaning of the removal of the works from the sacred buildings from which they came and (thanks to the display for the first time to the public of the Pilotta’s nineteenth-century painting) the artistic context of this reinvention."

Around the four Correggio masterpieces (the Madonna with a Bowl and the Madonna of St. Jerome, plus the two canvases from the Bono Chapel) that with the Second Treaty of Paris in 1815 were returned to Parma from the Louvre where they had flowed as a result of Napoleonic requisitions, the exhibition also presents the best of the nineteenth-century production of the Duchy, at the time when this “secularized” Correggio became the hero of national painting in Parma. After 1815, the Palazzo della Pilotta represented a suitable refuge to house the art heritage that needed to be reassembled and enhanced, and for this reason it became necessary to carry out a survey of the rooms of the Rocchetta and the premises where the Academy of Fine Arts was located, as well as to plan the expansion of the exhibition space in the vast halls adjacent to the Rocchetta, entrusted to the architects Nicolò Bettoli (Parma, 1780 - 1854) and Paolo Toschi (Parma, 1788 - Berlin, 1854), who, with the display of Correggio’s works in the Rocchetta’s small rooms, entrusted it with the role of sanctum sanctorum of the picture gallery of Maria Luigia of Habsburg, duchess of Parma (Vienna, 1791 - Parma, 1847).

Expansion work began in 1821 and was completed between 1835 and 1838. Uniting the Correggio and the 19th-century masterpieces is Paolo Toschi, a fine engraver, architect and director of the Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1757 by Duke Filippo di Borbone, then strongly supported by the Duchess (in fact, the exhibition is also meant to be a tribute to Toschi and Maria Luigia). Toschi obtained that the two altarpieces and the two canvases became an exercise tool for the students of his Academy, who were then placed on structures that made them orientable to facilitate their illumination, that is, viewing them in any light. Toschi had spread Correggio’s work throughout Europe through copper engravings, contributing to the fame of the master and the city. His are the watercolors reproducing the frescoes of the Duomo and San Giovanni that can be seen in the exhibition between the two altarpieces, some sent to the Great Exhibition in London in 1855 to represent the art of the Duchy. Many of his works and those of his pupils are therefore displayed in these rooms in counterpoint to the Renaissance originals, restoring to the visitor the sense of a cultural and artistic reinvention of primary importance for the historiography of Italian art.

Toschi’s artistic vision was embedded in the Luigino cultural climate, which was influenced by a neoclassical taste of still imperial ancestry, open, however, to the emerging Romantic taste for historical subjects and nature. In the exhibition, Francesco Scaramuzza ’s work, represented by a monumental Silvia and Aminta, sent in 1862 to illustrate Parma at the Universal Exhibition in London, belongs to the first strand. More compliant with Romantic taste, on the other hand, are the two Rebels purchased directly by Maria Luigia, the two monumental canvases by Giuseppe Molteni, another “official” painter of the duchy of Lucca, while the small work by Ferdinando Storelli represents the aesthetics of what the duchess wanted a long-lived and significant Parma school of landscape painting.

One of the areas in which Luigino patronage was undoubtedly most expressed was in religious painting, marked by a paternalist conception of the state. Merciful iconographies, in fact, or celebrating alms-giving activities or sovereign handouts multiplied out of all proportion and saw the official artists of the court active: it is possible to cite, as examples, Francesco Scaramuzza’s Saint John the Baptist and Enrico Barbieri’s David with the head of Goliath. In several works the reference to the masters of Emilian painting appears to be declined in a “nationalistic” key of exaltation of the Parma genius. (Which is also genius and celebration of the artist, as expressed by the flowering of the genre of the self-portrait). But contemporaneity also bursts into the ancient Duchy, forcing Parma’s academic culture to emancipate itself: among the consequences is landscape painting, which is now focused on the forces (natural and therefore scientific) that characterize the universal vastness of reality. Alberto Pasini’s spectacular canvases, like the diaporamas of the time, reproduce in an immersive key the exotic landscapes in which the life of the most remote peoples took place. Cecrope Barilli meanwhile searches for the exotic hidden in the primitive of popular classes devoted to forms of existence similar to those of colonized lands, while a whole new universe is the one introduced by Amedeo Bocchi, who already introduces the twentieth century.

Pictured is a detail of Correggio’s Madonna di san Girolamo.

A new exhibit for Correggio at the Pilotta in Parma. Starting in the fall

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