There is that for the lost homeland and that for a country – one’s own – that one will never be able to see again, that for the time of childhood or for the vestiges of the ancient, that for a golden age, the lost paradise to which one can return only with thought and imagination or again and finally, that for those who are no longer here.
Nostalgia. Modernity of a feeling from the Renaissance to the contemporary (Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, until 1 September, rooms of the Doge’s Apartment, curated by Matteo Fochessati in collaboration with Anna Vyazemtseva) is the great exhibition dedicated to an ancient but current feeling and always, in some way, present in the art to this day.
IN AN EXCURSUS chronologically large, articulated and varied – present architectural models (Armando Brasini, Antonio Maraini and Michele Busiri Vici), ceramic objects (Giò Ponti, Clarice Cliff and Duilio Cambellotti), photographs (Florence Henry and Gregorio Prieto), sketches for sculptures in chalk (Cristoforo Marzaroli) – the exhibition itinerary takes place starting from the 1688 degree thesis of Johannes Hofer, a young medical scholar in Basel, focused on the study of the state of physical and psychological suffering of Swiss mercenaries and away students and then moving into the many variations of nostalgia traceable in the history of art.
The nostalgia for sites of antiquity that have now disappeared is, for example, that in the gigantic tempera with Ideal reconstruction of ancient Ostia and Trajan’s port which – on loan at the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, like many other works on display – comes from the Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection: Roger Séassal, Grand Prix de Rome in 1913, executed it in 1922, reconstructing the smallest details of the site with meticulous care. A form of nostalgia was that which, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, characterized artists who, inspired by patriotic ideals, harked back to local ancient sagas in the name of their country’s independence. This is the case of the Norwegian tapestry – with a highly stylized geometric layout therefore suitable for an embroidered version – taken from The suiters (1892) by Gerhard Munthe: three white bears (the suitors) approach three young women whose hair becomes electrified in fear.
BY CAMBELLOTTI – also in the wake of romantic nationalism – are on display a ceramic model of Hut in the Roman countryside (1910-1912) as well as the elevation and axonometry of the same: very fine and wonderful strokes of watercolor ink. That the climate of revival had also become an elitist escape from reality is demonstrated by figures such as Evan Mackenzie, here in a beautiful portrait by Luigi de Servi and also immortalized in 1909 by Carlo Coppedè in the wall decorations of his Genoese castle – Mackenzie – with his family in traditional Scottish clothes, or also like Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli whose bedroom, painted by Luigi Bisi between 1880 and 1886, catches the eye because it is dark, full of drapes and wooden carvings with flickering light, in short a baroque creation of Bertini – Scrosati couple, authors of the many environments visible in the museum of the same name and inspired by styles of the past.
It couldn’t help but figure that out nostalgia for elsewherethe desire for distant and different places evoked, for example in the collector, by his own objects: these are the words of Vittorio Pica who, in 1894, leafing through his collection of Japanese graphics, says that «the enchanting archipelago is too far away and I am condemned – like many others not to contemplate that beloved land except with the eyes of the imagination”, or sometimes the real nostalgia for a place where one lived and worked: Galileo Chini, invited in 1911 by King Rama VI to Bangkok , carries out the pictorial decorations of the Palace of the Throne for him and will remember his stay with the pointillist moment of The nostalgic hour on Mè-Nam of 1912.
THE LOOK nostalgic about childhood and family groups is entrusted to Aristide Sartorio (Lidio and Lucio on the beach in Fregene1927 complete with a dedication at the bottom to HRH Princess Mary of Savoy and a light and light color table) and to Ettore Tito who, in Lido beach from 1914, stages carefree moments of mothers and children on the seashore, shaken by the wind.
And then there are many other nostalgias present here, expressed and felt in the most diverse ways. In the reclined and thoughtful heads one can find something, childhood memories, perfumes or an era in which, one thinks, it would perhaps have been more beautiful to live, losing oneself in the unknown and unknowable blue of Yves Klein, adored by Jarman but also in glances of the migrants in the work entitled Temporary detention center: portraits by the Albanian Adrian Paci crowding onto the planeless finger overlooking the nothingness that awaits them.
