ROME.- The exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, a selection of works from the collection of the internationally renowned museum of Frankfurt, founded in 1815 through a bequest by merchant and banker Johann Friedrich Städel (1728-1816) and among Europe’s richest and most prized collections of ancient and modern art, besides being a unique foundation for the time in which it was instituted.

The already vast original collection has since been constantly added to with further acquisitions, both of old masters and of the so-called “mobile present” pieces of contemporary art bought over the years. In 1878 the collection was moved from its original location in Städel’s former home in the old town centre of Frankfurt to a grandiose new building on the opposite bank of the Main, where it is still housed today and which is currently undergoing an ambitions programme of restoration and enlargement. The Städel Museum now comprises over 100,000 works that cover Europe’s entire artistic evolution from the Renaissance to the present day.

In line with the ‘modernist’ vocation adopted by the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the selection focuses on the museum’s 19th and 20th century art, offering an overview of this period in European art history that spans from the Nazarenes to the Romantics, Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism and the early 20th century Avant-garde movements. The show is articulated in seven stylistic and chronological sections, each housed in one of the seven galleries that surround the monumental Rotonda of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Among the many highlights of the exhibition, there are works by Tischbein, Koch, Corot, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Böcklin, Feuerbach and right up to Moreau, Redon, Hodler, Munch, Beckmann, Ernst, Klee, Picasso.