The relationship between Boldini and French Impressionism will be explored in this great exhibition.

Boldini painted a fascinating picture called Cantante mondana [“Society singer”] in the mid-1880s. It shows a snapshot of the Paris of the late nineteen-hundreds - the life, the cafés and the music halls that the artist patronised along with his friends and fellow-painters like Degas - and as such lay outside the area for which he was renowned, namely portrait painting.

Palazzo dei Diamanti

Tre grandi progetti per la fine del secolo Ventesimo
L'arte di Ferrara da qualche anno è entrata in possesso di uno strumento di grandissima efficacia evocativa, che nessuna, o quasi, tra le grandi città dell'arte italiana può esibire con altrettanto legittimo orgoglio. Da quando uno storico, Werner Gundersheimer, ha portato alla conoscenza degli amatori dell'arte lo straordinario manoscritto vaticano di mano di Sabadino degli Arienti,

Another major artistic event in the halls of Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara.

In his last known letter, a month before his death, Paul Gauguin wrote to the French critic and poet Charles Morice: «That's why solitude does not suit everybody; you need to be strong to stand and act alone. Everything I have learned from others has hindered me. Therefore I can say: no one has taught me anything. On the other hand, it's also true that I know so little! But I prefer that little, which I have created. And who knows if that little, once it has been exploited by others, will one day become much?...».

A brief guide to the exhibition in the Palazzo dei Diamanti organized by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara.

Preamble

In September 1940, Giorgio Bassani went to visit Roberto Longhi in his house in the hills above Florence. With him were Carlo Carrà and Alberto Graziani, a young pupil of Longhi's who recounted the story as told him by Bassani. The tale went more or less as follows: Miss V. of Florence is sixty years old and the last of an old and noble Ferrarese family. She is a delicate hot house exotic in poor health, who adores and defends from the gaze of outsiders a formidable collection of paintings by Ercole, Cossa, Jacopo Bellini, Tura... Her entire love-life has been dominated and perturbed by a profound attachment to these pictures, mentioned as early as the Sixteenth century in certain morbid letters that an ancestor of hers had written to a friend. The pictures form the backcloth to the events of the woman's love-life.

An exhibition to celebrate Tasso's theory of style.
The restoration carried out by Ottorino Nonfarmale of Titian's Ascension in the Church of San Salvatore in Venice is to mark the occasion of a refined exhibition that will bring together the work of a series of painters who from that painting, but especially from Tasso's theory of style, brought about a profound revolution regarding the concept of representation, detached from the traditional investigations into chiaroscuro and obtained instead through sensory matching, by a kind of synaesthesia.

«Beneath her veil and beyond the stream, she seemed more to me to surpass her ancient self... than to surpass others when she was ancient self.»
(Dante)

Ferrara is not about effects - laborious effects hastily collected and negligently scattered by idle minds. In some instances, like the frescoes of June and July in the Palazzo Schifanoia, works have suffered more from solicitude than neglect. The Ferrarese, in my estimation, have never exhausted the beautiful looking for the novel.

Dal 7 giugno al 30 agosto, una grande mostra realizzata con il contributo della Fondazione.

L'opera di uno dei maggiori pittori del Settecento, protagonista assoluto del Rococò europeo e anticipatore dell'arte romantica, giunge per la prima volta in Italia, nelle sale del Palazzo dei Diamanti, per un evento espositivo eccezionale che raduna una somma di capolavori che, dagli anni lontani delle mostre di Londra e di Parigi, non è più stata raccolta.

The first Renaissance town plan sprang from a blend of strategy, philosophy and the old town plan.
Some years ago, I made the documentary Ferrara prima città moderna: through scenes from life and prints, the film illustrated the fundamental characteristics of the Addizione, the extensions to the city ordered by Duke Ercole. In order to make the film I first had to solve various preliminary problems, which involved a long and complex research effort.

The imagination of the landscape artist Giuseppe Zola, a leading light of 17th century Ferrarese figurative art, was both fertile and inventive.
In 1971, Palazzo dei Diamanti was the venue for an exhibition organized by Eugenio Riccomini in which sixty brilliantly restored paintings introduced the public to works and artists that were all but unknown, including Giuseppe Zola, present with twenty large canvases.