A friendship, an exchange of letters, a shared vocation. For the landscape, for painting, for transcribing the movements of the earth into palpitations of color. The new project, launched by the MAN museum in Nuoro, aims to reconstruct for the first time the ideal legacy that Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907), a noble father of Italian Divisionism, handed down to Antonio Ballero (1864-1932), a Sardinian artist who, straddling the past and progress, steered a painting still steeped in realist demands towards the experimental ways of Divisionism, conveying the late romantic culture dominant in the island's panorama towards a scientific research on color combined with a changing narrative of the perceived. By forging a close bond with Pellizza da Volpedo, interrupted by the tragic death of the latter, Antonio Ballero strongly contributed to opening Sardinia to investigations on that new language of painting and on the theories of "divided" color that were at the forefront of the ongoing national and international debate. It was thanks to Pellizza da Volpedo's teachings and the intellectual exchange that ensued that Ballero managed to carve out a leading role in the evolution of artistic research on the island, which, thanks to him, was fully immersed in the current debates that were stirring on the continent.

The project, curated by Chiara Gatti and coordinated by Rita Moro, with the scientific consultancy of Gabriella Belli, a leading scholar of Italian Divisionism, and Antonello Cuccu, a scholar and expert on Sardinian art, establishes a close relationship between the outcomes of the Sardinian master with the stimuli received from the privileged relationship with Pellizza da Volpedo, evidenced by an iconographic comparison and also by the letters dated between 1904 and 1907 that document their contacts and the liveliness of their dialogue. Two works by Ballero were praised by Pellizza as a true "revelation," as Pellizza himself confessed to the Sardinian master in a brief letter. It was thanks to this ideal closeness that Ballero's expressive and formal research embarked on the path of an aesthetic maturation tinged with new and more powerful social content.