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closed Portraits in music between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The show

In the Music room of the Villa Bernasconi museum, the Municipality of Cernobbio, in collaboration with the Arte Nova Foundation , presents from 26 January 2023 to 20 March 2023, the exhibition Ritratti in musica tra Otto e Novecento, a selection of photographic portraits from Art Nouveau and pictorialist atmosphere, from a private collection.

The exhibition is curated by Claudia Taibez, head of the Museum, and Elena Franco, artistic director of the Arte Nova Foundation.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the art of photographic portraiture was by now consolidated in Europe. The small carte de visite – which, starting from 1870, were joined by the larger Cabinet format – were printed in large numbers, thanks to the work of numerous photographic studios. They are exchanged, sent to friends and relatives, kept in family albums. They bear witness to the taste and atmosphere of a changing world, in full swing, and which will soon find itself immersed in the dark years of the First World War. The proposed portraits – contemporary enlargements made starting from the original photographs – tell, however, with elements still from the nineteenth century or with details typical of the Liberty style – Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, if you prefer – of the beauty that music communicates. Young women and men , girls and boys are portrayed by the ateliers of the time posing with their instruments or before dancing, sometimes with elaborate costumes and disguises. The contemporary advances in technology, with the invention of cameras that are easy to handle and suitable for use not only by portrait photographers, but also by passionate amateurs, mean that everyday life is also being photographed more and more often. It is thus possible to observe, through the portraits on display, not only the set of installations of the posing studios, the backgrounds used, the furnishings to support the composition, but also environments of the time, interiors of houses, gardens, where even the clothes of the people portrayed contribute to the story of new era in which it is not painting, in crisis in the face of the presumed representation of the truth, but the art of photography that gives us the memory of the complexity of a society in transformation.

The exhibition is included in the entrance ticket to the museum. Concerts and collateral events are scheduled to be discovered HERE.

Works on display

Timetable and tickets

Address

Largo Alfredo Campanini, 2
22012 Cernobbio

Contacts

More on the program

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PLANTALIA

Until 01 May 2024

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LIBERTY IN FABRIC

Until 01 May 2024

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SIGNED LUCHINO

Until 03 November 2024


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