UPDATE OF 01/10/2024

The exhibition has been extended until Sunday 13 October.

The exhibition ““Ospiti/2 – Angelo morbelli, Per Sempre” will open on Sunday 14 July at the Tadini Academy Gallery in Lovere.

The exhibition will be open at the following times until Sunday 29 September :
– from Tuesday to Saturday: 15:00 – 19:00;
– Sundays and holidays: 10:00 – 12:00 / 15:00 – 19:00.

Entrance fee: €14.00 (reduced €10.00).

Reservations are recommended for groups

Lovere, Tadini Academy. The exhibition “Ospiti/2 – Angelo Morbelli” opens on 14 July. Forever.” On this occasion, Count Tadini’s house opens up, ideally, offering an insight into other houses and other collections, identifying the collector’s curiosity and the quality of the proposals as a common thread.
The main work, Morbelli, Forever (oil on canvas, 87×135 cm) also known as Terrace on Lake Iseo, exhibited for the first time to the public in 1906 at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Milan, features in the background a view of the lake taken from the garden of Villa Caprera in Bossico.
The extraordinary canvas is prepared from sketches both for the landscape, also executed through the use of photography, and for the female figure. At least three versions are known: in addition to the one from Zitti donated by Don Gino Angelico Scalzi to the Tadini Academy, we should mention the version – very similar – in a private collection and a third which recently passed onto the antiques market and is now in a private collection. The three sketches will be displayed next to the main canvas thanks to the kind collaboration of the collectors and the Quadreria dell’800, Milan.
The canvas represents one of Morbelli’s most mature results also for the adoption of the pointillist technique: the “much derided theory of dots, which we call color division”, as the artist himself noted in one of his letters.
The Ospiti exhibition, inaugurated last year with the exhibition of Antonio Canova’s sketch, Polimnia, aims to offer the possibility of exhibiting to the public, in easier ways than the programming of an exhibition, one or two works considered significant for the dialogue that can open with works from the permanent collection of the Tadini Academy Gallery.
Faced with this, there is a second reason that links this canvas to Lovere: the inscription on the back of the Lovere panel, “September 1903. Morbelli a Caprera” allows the painter’s passage on Lake D to be fixed to that year. ‘Iseo, and to relate it to the presence of artists invited by Giovanni Battista Zitti to share the stay of Villa Caprera on the Bossico plateau.
The third theme that runs through the exhibition is the reflection on the landscape. In 2023 the Fondazione Accademia Tadini onlus, thanks to the support of the Circolo Amici del Tadini and other private sponsors, purchased Cesare Tallone’s landscape, View of Lake Iseo, painted by Bossico. With that work Tallone “invents” a new point of view. The fascination of the lake landscape, a theme to which the Tadini Academy dedicated the fascinating exhibition Acquosissima Lombardia (Lovere, 22 April-2 September 2001) in 2001, finds an interpretation of the highest level in Morbelli’s canvas, which will contribute to consolidating the myth of Lake Iseo in the years that saw the completion of the coastal road and the birth of tourism.

Exhibition curated by Marco Albertario, with the collaboration of Aurora Scotti, Silvia Capponi and Elisabetta Chiodini

Text and cover image credits: Accademia Tadini