ROME.- The Vittoriano Complex will feature the works of 19th-century French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. According to curator Kathleen Adler, Renoir had already turned his back on Impressionism - the movement that made him famous - by the time he took the voyage from October 1881 to January 1882. She believes the visit was key to his subsequent development as an artist.

Kathleen Adler said, ''Those few weeks spent in Italy provided a solid base for his new interests, exercising on him an influence that would last for the rest of his life.”

The Vittoriano Complex exhibition will present 130 works on loan from museums across the world that Renoir painted after his trip, during the last 40 years of his life.

According to Adler Renoir is thought of primarily as an Impressionist, his link with the movement was really a ''parenthesis'' that lasted between 1873 and 1877.

Adler said, “That's a very short period in the arc of a very long career, and for that reason it's necessary to re-evaluate the 40 years that followed in a different light.''

Renoir wrote in 1880, ''I milked Impressionism for all it was worth and I came to the conclusion that I couldn't draw or paint.''