Two Centuries of Gazes

At the Galleria Le Muse in Cortina d’Ampezzo, “Glimpses of Two Centuries: Italy Between a Reflection of the Real and Modern Dream” offers a refined journey through Italian art from the 19th to the 20th century, featuring works capable of narrating reality by transforming it into atmosphere, memory, silence, and vision.

The journey begins with “Market at Santa Margherita” (1885) by Ettore Tito, a scene of everyday Venetian life vibrant with light, movement, and chromatic sensitivity, a testimony to a pictorial modernity that is already fully recognizable. It continues with “Oxford Street, London” by Paolo Sala, where the modern city becomes rhythm, elegance, and light, viewed through the cosmopolitan gaze of an artist accustomed to painting from life.

The suspended and metaphysical dimension emerges in “Landscape” (1930) by Antonio Donghi, dominated by a crystallized calm and that “plastic calm” that renders reality enigmatic and timeless. With “The Wedding” by Lorenzo Viani, instead, the everyday transforms into a grotesque and unsettling theater, oscillating between irony, existential tension, and criticism of bourgeois conformism.

Ideally concluding the journey is the “Portrait of Nena Duè” (1951) by Felice Casorati, where formal rigor and inner intensity meet in a feminine presence of extraordinary sobriety and authority.

An itinerary that invites one to look at Italy with different eyes: from the real to the vision, from light to silence, from everyday life to dreams.