From September 27 to November 30, 2025, Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia (RM) hosts the exhibition "The Tommasi Ferroni. Extravagances and eccentricities of virtuous painting", curated by Mariaimma Gozzi and Francesco Petrucci.

The exhibition welcomes the works of the artists Riccardo, Elena, and Giovanni Tommasi Ferroni, in the exclusivity of refined pictorial languages and in the peculiarity of the ad hoc setting in the rooms of the prestigious palace, which collects about sixty works - including paintings and drawings - and denotes, in itself, a strong identity connotation in the authenticity of different stylistic elements and historical moments.

The unifying and emerging flame of the Tommasi Ferroni's paintings is the indispensable practice of academic drawing, the cultured, demanding, mannerist one. An incipit by Riccardo, which reverberates on his children Elena and Giovanni, but declined and interpreted by them following their own visionary creativity and inventiveness, the leitmotif of the entire exhibition.

Riccardo Tommasi Ferroni (Pietrasanta 1934 - Pieve di Camaiore 2000), a leading exponent of a family of artists, is considered by critics the forerunner of the return to great painting, the champion of the recovery of technique substantiated by the rigor of constructive drawing, following in the footsteps of Pietro Annigoni.

The discontinuity that the avant-gardes had created in the early twentieth century compared to the millennia-old tradition of learning in workshops and then in academies, led him, in an obsessive search for form, to develop an absolutely individual language, immediately recognizable, with no precedents or parallels.

His expressive form, made of compositional complexity, exhaustive elegance, exaltation of beauty - especially feminine - has as its main theme Time, a philosophical Greco-Roman Kronos, in a diachronic vision, where past, present, and future coexist simultaneously.

In many of his paintings emerges the sense of passing time, the metamorphosis of things and people, youth and old age, vigor and decay, with a tragic undertone of the inevitability of destiny rooted in Greek thought, in that classicism that he would like to revive through his painting.