Boldini and the Italians in Paris

Giovanni Boldini's Marchesa Luisa Casati, with a Greyhound

Chiostro del Bramante in Rome – behind Piazza Navona – usually holds a grand exhibition each winter season. This years exhibition is dedicated to the painter Giovanni Boldini and the Italian artists who lived in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century.

During the late nineteenth century, France was to lead the way in contemporary art and constituted for many countries – as well as Italy – an unparalleled model of civilization. The Italian painters in paris were thus led to a continuous confrontation with the modern art of France at the Universal Exhibitions held there regularly.

The real “myth of Paris” is a result of so-called Belle Epoque, a sort of golden age marked by the triumph of the model bourgeois liberal and secular, from the great freedom of thought, of prodigious scientific discoveries, by a decisive acceleration of transport, from the birth of mass tourism, from the great splendour of the theatres and newspapers in print.

La Belle Epoque, indicating the happy time in which the middle classes come to enjoy a degree of prosperity. Paris became, in virtue of this, a true literary and artistic laboratory in which artistic tendencies coexisted very different from each other.

Giovanni Boldini in his atelie

The exhibition shows the biographies of three famous “Italians in Paris” – Boldini, De Nittis and Zandomeneghi – and it moves between the places dear to the myth of modernity of Paris – theaters, cafes, boulevards, the studios of famous artists and those bohemian painters.

Included is also pieces by Vittorio Corcos, Antonio Mancini, Paul Helleu, Leon Bonnat, Telemaco Signorini, Serafino De Tivoli.

The exhibition presents works from private collections, and easily accessible to the general public, which will be displayed alongside important loans from Italian institutions such as the Galleria d ‘Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, the Galleria degli Uffizi, and international institutions like the Musée d ‘Orsay.

Rome, Chiostro del Bramante
Opening hours
Every day 10.00-20.00
Mondays closed
Special opening hours:
24 december 10.00 – 14.00
25 december 16.00 – 20.00
28 december 10.00 – 20.00
31 december 10.00 – 17.00
1 january 10.00 – 20.00
4 january 10.00 – 20.00
6 january 10.00 – 20.00