Great success, on yesterday’s public holiday, for the extraordinary round of free guided tours (without reservation) to the great exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelites, Modern Renaissance’, hosted at the San Domenico Museum in Forlì until the end of June. In total there were 1,500 entries yesterday and 60 thousand people attended the exhibition since it opened.
Conceived and created by the Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì Foundation, in collaboration with the Municipality, the exhibition takes the viewer back to Victorian England in the mid-nineteenth century, when some young artists rebelled against the rigorous rules imposed by the Royal Academy and profoundly renewed painting English through the rediscovery of the great Italian Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painting.
There were queues with hundreds of people patiently waiting to admire the masterpieces on display, thanks to loans from numerous international museums. And in particular some foreign visitors, especially English, who came specifically to Forlì to contemplate the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt who, gathered in a brotherhood, dared to change the course of art. Two young Chinese tourists were also absorbed in observing the tapestry of the Holy Grail at the end of the large hall of the Church of San Giacomo for a few minutes, captivated by the vision of the knights arming themselves. Designed in 1890 and woven in 1898/99, the high-warp tapestry with wool and silk weft on cotton warp comes from a private collection. “How wonderful…”, whisper Eastern visitors as they look at the work of designers Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John Henry Dearle.
The groups, also made up of people from outside the region, stop above all in the large initial room of the Forlì exhibition which has a total of 350 works, the largest exhibition on the theme ever held. A transversal audience, with young and old, united by the desire to immerse themselves in the art of English authors who dreamed of retracing the footsteps of the ancient masters of 15th century Italy, especially Tuscan. Particularly appreciated and with the most prolonged stops are the places where you can admire up close the masterpieces of Cimabue and Giotto, Beato Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, Mantegna and Verrocchio, passing through Michelangelo, Titian and Botticelli. The Pre-Raphaelites sought fidelity to nature, the pure vision of the reality of things, with inspiration from the absolute and the passion of love, the same that makes visitors leave satisfied after an immersion in art and beauty.
Gianni Bonali
