Comunicato stampa
It opens on 23 September 2022 at the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna The Painters of Pompeii, one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the autumn exhibition season in Italy which will remain visible until March 19, 2023.
Curated by Mario Grimaldi and produced by MondoMostre, the exhibition is made possible by a cultural and scientific collaboration agreement between the Municipality of Bologna, the Civic Archaeological Museum and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples which provides for the exceptional loan of over 100 works from the Roman era belonging to to the collection of the Neapolitan museum, which houses the largest art gallery of antiquity in the world.
The exhibition project focuses on the figures of the pictores, or rather the artists and artisans who created the decorative elements in the houses of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Vesuvian area, to contextualize their role and economic condition in the society of the time, as well as highlighting the techniques, tools, colors and models. The very important patrimony of images that these authors have left us - splendid frescoes with still bright colors, often large in size - indeed reflects the tastes and values of a varied client and allows us to better understand the mechanisms underlying the production system. of the shops.
Very little information has come to us about the authors of these extraordinary works and almost no name is known to us. Thanks to the numerous pictorial testimonies preserved after the eruption in 79 AD and brought to light by the great Bourbon excavations in the eighteenth century, the Vesuvian towns constitute a privileged observatory to better understand the internal organization and the work of the painting workshops.
In Bologna, for the first time, a corpus of extraordinary examples of Roman painting from those domus famous for the beauty of their wall decorations will be exhibited, from which they often also take the name by which they are known. Masterpieces - just to name a few - from the domus of the Tragic Poet, of Punished Love, and of the Villas of Fannio Sinistore in Boscoreale, and of the Papyri in Herculaneum.
The visitor will be able to admire a wide selection of the most popular compositional schemes in the different periods of Roman art, observing how some artists were able to give an original vision of decorative models that are continuously varied and updated on the basis of local fashions and styles.
Relive scenes of welcoming the guest, refined images of landscapes and gardens, architecture, but also admire the technical tools for designing and executing the work: colors, squares, compasses, plumb lines, preparatory drawings, original finds found during the excavations Pompeian, including cups still filled with colors dating back to two thousand years ago. And, again, tricliniums, oil lamps, jugs, vases, which have resurfaced in the excavations and depicted in the frescoes on display, with which they conversed in space.
The exhibition will finally propose the reconstruction of entire Pompeian rooms such as those of the House of Jason and, even more than the extraordinary domus of Meleager with its large frescoes with stucco reliefs, to tell the relationship between space and decoration, the result of sharing choices, and messages to be transmitted, between the pictores and their clients.
If in the world of classical Greece the painters were considered "property of the universe" - as Pliny the Elder recalls to underline their importance and role - at the time of the Romans, the pictores were seen as skilled craftsmen, and only some of them conquered , for the quality and refinement of their creations, the role of artists.
And their art, from a profession reserved for marginal social classes - slaves, freedmen - becomes an art that qualifies those who practice it.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a rich educational offer will be offered not only for schools of all levels but also for families and adults.
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