MILAN MILANO ITALY | VIA MONTENAPOLEONE PEOPLE & EVENTS | PEOPLE & EVENTS IN VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

The exhibition presents more than 260 pieces that were created between the 16th and the 20th centuries by 140 artists, including Rosalba Carriera, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani, Nathalie Gontcharova, Camille Claudel and Tamara de Lempicka, from museums and collections present in 14 European and extra-European countries, including the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence and the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte di Napoli.
“One thing is certain, in no other age,” wrote Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, “than our own has it been possible to know; where women have acquired some very important arts”. Therefore, the expositive path could not have begun at any other time than the Renaissance, when, in Italy and Europe, the female artist no longer represented, as in Medieval times, an isolated phenomenon. Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana were some of the first women artists to be active in 16th Century Italy.
A legendary figure, for having received, when she was very old and by then blind, the honour of a visit from Anton van Dyck, Sofonisba Anguissola (1535-1625 ca.), from Cremona, had specialized, like her sisters, above all in portraits and self-portraits, introducing a theme that would have, in the artist’s biographies, a special importance and a precise meaning, which was destined to become one of the main veins of feminine art up through to the present day. Two of her most important pieces, Self Portrait at an Easel and The Chess Game, are on display in the exhibition. Anguissola, the first woman artist to benefit from the patronage of European monarchs, was known as the “Dama di honore de la Reyna” of Spain.
Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), one of her almost-contemporaries from Bologna, became in her own way the official portrait artist for the noble families of her native city. The daughter of one of the protagonists of the Bolognese style of Mannerism who had been very active in Rome during the second half of the 16th Century, Lavinia was trained at her father’s school, animated by an eclectic taste that united the Tuscan-Roman and Parmense models with the first inklings of the new spirit that would nourish Caracci’s “reform”.
It was quite common that these female artists were the daughters, sisters or wives of artists.
Another example is Marietta Robusti (1550-1590 ca.), the daughter of Tintoretto, who was known as la Tintoretta, and whose luminous Self Portrait graces the walls of the Uffizzi Gallery, provides a reference to her musical training, which was typical of the educational mores of that era.
But it is the Roman artist, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) who occupied a fundamental role in the affirmation of women artists, not just because she was a great painter, but also because she provided the inspiration, during the 1970s, for a revived interest of a feminist and social nature, throughout the female world of the arts. The daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, one of Caravaggio’s earliest followers, she was raped by a very refined painter, Agostino Tassi, whom she reported him to authorities. The file of the rape trial was one of the first documents of its kind and explains the obscure fascination which, along with her style of painting, transformed her into a timeless heroine. She continued to paint scenes dripping with purplish-red blood and she left behind some of the most amazing images of Judith. The Biblical heroines Judith, Susanna and Bathsheba became the some of the preferred subjects of Artemisia as well for many other 17th Century female artists who chose to represent exceptional women from both classical and Biblical times, femmes fortes who represented their own fate.
Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), the daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani, a painter who was a student of Guido Reni, had a destiny that was the exact opposite of Artemisia’s. Completely dedicated to her art, she only lived to be twenty-seven. She worked relentlessly, but died suddenly, possibly having been poisoned. And so it was that she became a legend: she was a woman, she was a painter and she was also the daughter of a painter. Her premature death added yet another aura to her personality; the suspected poisoning transformed her life story into something akin to a mystery novel.
During the 17th Century the panorama of female artists provided a collection of amazing biographies, including Italy’s Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) who specialised in the extremely refined technique of pastels, represented here by a splendid Self Portrait and a man’s Portrait, and who was active in Europe’s most important courts, from Paris to Vienna. There was also Switzerland’s Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1897), a cultured interpreter of a precocious neoclassicism that was still imbued with Rococo graces, splendidly represented in two of her works of art, Herminia and Immortality, which are included in the exhibition.
With the arrival of the 19th Century, the ranks thickened: they included Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) sister-in-law to Edouard Manet as well as a protagonist of Impressionism and its battles who specialized in the rendering of intimate, domestic scenes, Eva Gonzalès (1849 – 1883), and the American, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), who was discovered by Degas and introduced by him to the Impressionist setting.
Suzanne Valadon (1867-1938), the mother of Maurice Utrillo, was a figure who maintained an intelligent balance between the two centuries, so much so that she provided a preview of many Fauvist and Cubist visions. During those same years, the tormented life of Camille Claudel (1864-1943) played itself out. She was one of the 19th Century’s most important sculptors, whose existence was marked by her relationship with Auguste Rodin, her maestro. The exhibition includes the famous portrait of the young student that was painted by her lover and a bronze sculpture representing The Waltz. She was a great sculptress, a powerful artisan, an untiring worker; she was also the only woman in Rodin’s studio who was allowed to sculpt marble – considered a man’s job in that era. At the same time she was a delicate and very sensitive interpreter, who transformed Rodin’s model into the most modern nuances of curves and decorative motifs: she lowered the maestro’s powerful and monumental tone, to discover the force that was also contained within a sculpture of inferior dimensions.
And finally, the exhibition reaches the 20th century through the extremely elegant work of Elisabeth Chaplin (1890-1982), an artist of French origin but Italian culture, represented with two of her avant garde masterpieces on loan from Pitti Palace’s Modern Art Gallery, and England’s Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), who, along with her sister, Virginia Woolf, was involved in an extraordinarily vivacious movement that occurred in England at the turn of the century.
Artists like Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938), Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), are also represented with a robust series of works of art; they lived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Germany during the early years of Expressionism, competing with their Italian counterparts who launched themselves into the enthusiasm of Futurism, focusing on the mass media.
Tamara de Lempicka (1902-1980) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), were two meteoric stars who stood out from the rest, not only for their astounding art, but also for their amazing life stories. Highly individualistic authors, they managed to trace their unique and independent lines among the century’s currents.
The 20th Century opens up wide to the complexity of modern art, presenting scattered voices, which can no longer be classified according to a specific order, neither by nationality nor by tendencies, and featuring Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985), the undisputed protagonist of an always avant garde Experimentalism.

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