ROME.- Ponti Art Gallery offers important masterpieces coming from several private collections gathered in the usual monthly exhibition aimed to the sale. The selection starts from the masterpiece by Carla Celesia di Vegliasco. Florentine by birth and of Lombard training, Carla Celesia of Vegliasco, the lady of Tuscan symbolism, had created a large living room in her villa in Collesalvetti, one of the most prestigious of the time, in which artists such as Pietro D’Achiardi, the brothers Tommasi and Luigi and Francesco Gioli regularly participated. Trained at Filippo Carcano’s free academy of painting, Carla has shown a great attraction for the symbolist language since the early 1900s, and ended up joining, with her monumental pictorial work in the interiors of Villa Il Poggio, that cult of Primitives that many other artists of Pisa, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were maturing, with the teaching of Nino Costa and with the historic critical commitment of Igino Benvenuto Supino, Antony de Witt, Pietro D’Achiardi to arrive at Spartaco Carlini and Alberto Thin. Her is however a sui generis symbolism that does not forget the Tuscan tradition. A symbolic art, on the one hand a study of truth and the other copy of ancient and holy art. An inescapable combination for those like Celesia who have followed the dream of a new aesthetic since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Baroness painter will end with the imposition in 1912 with works characterized by a frequentation of the true filtered by moods of extreme emotional vibration, appearing at the Venice Biennale in 1912 with the painting presented here, appreciated by Contaldi “for the subject, for the conception”, as well as for the acrobatic lighting effects. The painting constitutes the secessionist vertex in the context of the artist’s production, whose genesis, articulated by various studies of male nudes, is found between the lines of her correspondence. The painting was awarded with the only gold medal awarded in the Milan section within the II International Women’s Fine Arts Exhibition.

The selection of the proposal displayed by Ponti Art Gallery continues with a wonderful painting by Luigi Bazzani. Moving to Rome to continue his scenographic activity, Bazzani got in touch with Cesare Maccari, with whom he collaborated on the decorations of Palazzo Madama. In the following years he devoted himself to landscape painting, for which he obtained honorary titles from various Italian academies and various purchases from the Royal House. Among his Bolognese students is Tito Azzolini. At the State Archive of Terni there is a documentary fund in his name, while the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples preserve several works and watercolors that reproduce the frescoes in the ruins of Pompeii. The catalog of his works can basically be divided into two broad categories: the first relates to the punctual and scientific documentation of the ruins of Pompeii; the second includes contemporary views of the artist or scenes of life set in the most suggestive places of Rome. To this second category belongs the painting presented here that depicts the snow-covered Capitol: in particular, the foreshortening portrays the profiles of the monumental statues of the Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux that were placed at the top of the Cordonata Capitolina in 1584. Found in 1560, during the works inside the Ghetto had to be part of a temple dedicated to them, identified in the area of the Circus Flaminio. These are certainly Roman copies of Greek originals from the 5th century BC, remarkably restored as shown by the head of the statue on the left which is modern.

The further important artworks offered by Roman gallery are masterpiece by Attilio Torresini, Federico Melis, Antonio Senape, Mario Schifano, Pio Semeghini, Giovanni Costantini and Tancredi. In particular, the work presented by Ponti Art Gallery reflects the pictorial style of Tancredi centered on an increasingly evident fragmentation of the sign and on a bright chromatism, a driving element in the canvases. The energy of the stroke, combining with the luminous vibrations, creates a new harmony that corresponds to one of the happiest periods of the artist’s production, the early fifties, during which while remaining independent, he subscribes to the manifesto of the Space Movement together with Lucio Fontana.