ROME.- Ponti Art Gallery is offering important masterpieces coming from several private collections. The selection starts from an extraordinary rarity: a Volpato or Cialli manufacture, molded by Lorenzo Weber, showing Pio VI blessing on horseback during the Cavalcata for the Possession: a real discovery, an opportunity to meet the Volpato manufacture, one of the most important antiquarian collectors and mediators of antiquities active at the end of the 18th century. The second important painting offered by Ponti Art Gallery is a watercolour by Duclère, Entrance of Garibaldi in Palermo. In this painting, the author chooses, unlike other Risorgimento painters such as Giovanni Fattori, to immortalize the entrance of the patriot in the Sicilian capital, depicting Garibaldi with his fellow soldiers near the Palermo Cathedral, with its facade and monumental profiles of neo-Gothic bell towers – made by the architect Palazzotto a few decades before -, serves as a scenic backdrop to the story represented.
The selection of the proposal continues with an oil by Ettore Forti, The bath of the doves, already on display in the past in an important Paris gallery. The Roman artist is able to meticulously reconstruct the classical objects and decorations of the Neo-pompeian sphere, in which he combines a grandiose and luxurious environment with an intimate domestic dimension. The marble inlays of the floor decorated with diamond-shaped motifs and floral intertwining lead the eye of the relative to the female figure standing in the center, a Roman matron wrapped in her tenuous pink chiton, bearing twigs of lilies in her hands.
Another artist listed in the group of new proposals offered by Ponti Art Gallery is Alberto Rossi, whose two painting are presented: The chestnuts’ cooking and a view of St. Moritz, made by the Turin master between the end the beginning of the 19th century.
The sixth artwork is one of the most interesting among those offered by Ponti Art Gallery: a particular frame designed by Carlo Bugatti, artist well known all over the world: many of his creations are preserved in numerous internationally renowned museums, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, Montreal’s Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Miami Wolfson Collection.
The selection closes itself with four remarkable example of Italian Art of the 20th century: a terracotta statuette by Francesco Ciusa, one of the finest examples of his ceramic production, which depicts a young bride in Nuoro’s traditional dress, who, pregnant, smiles as she finds out that she can no longer fasten her corset; a painting by the Polish artist Feliks Michał Wygrzywalski dedicated to a Capri bather: and, last but not least, two important works by Antonio Sanfilippo and Corrado Cagli.
