The hunt for cadres has no rules, no objectives, no landfall, it is unpredictable, you can not find what you are looking for, you are looking for what you find, sometimes far beyond desire and expectations". This is how Vittorio Sgarbi describes the mystery of collecting: "the interest in what is not there.

Hence the idea of ​​the great exhibition "The hidden treasures: from Giotto to De Chirico" that from October 26th 2017 to May 2018 arrives in the prestigious museum spaces of the Museo Civico del Castello Ursino in Catania. The new great exhibition in Catania tells the story of the history of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Over a period of more than seven centuries, the evolution of the states, currents, and junctions of the history of Italian art is outlined through a selection of over one hundred works, including paintings and sculptures, owned by banking foundations, institutions and private collectors with the aim of enhancing, as the title indicates, a "hidden" artistic heritage, because it is not exhibited in public museums, and at the same time an interesting study on the peculiar and complex Italian "artistic geographic".

Like the acclaimed Benacense exhibition, the new edition of the exhibition is therefore a natural extension of the extraordinary exhibition "Il Tesoro d'Italia" which took place at the 2015 Universal Exposition in Milan, which was documented, from Piedmont to Sicily, the genetics of great masterpieces conceived by intelligence, moods, emotions that refer to places, lands, waters, winds that have generated them. Italy, moreover, is the place of complete happiness: of this it was completely aware, from Stendhal to Bernard Berenson, any foreigner has elected our country to his homeland, not being able to imagine a place of greater bliss on earth.

The greatness of Italian art is in fact in the inextricable fabric, rooted in a territory that is unique in the world for which the major works and minor contexts light up each other. From this assumption Roberto Longhi begins his new reading, without hierarchies and primates, of the Emilian art, in that area he defined Padanìa, recognizing, in 1934, the distinctive characteristics of the Officina Ferrarese, and of the moments of Bolognese painting. Thus began a rejection of all prejudices on Tuscan art, on which historiography had been built starting from Giorgio Vasari, and a recognition in each region characteristic and original. The idea of ​​Italy in its geographical and political unity is formed through two communicating engines: the Italian language and style. Italian, the "vulgar", is known from the twelfth century and is configured as a language in the literature and texts of Sicilian poets, in literary civilization at the court of Frederick II; with the poets of stilnovo, in Tuscany, and finally with Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio. The rebirth of the literary language codified by Pietro Bembo in the prose of the vernacular of 1525. For the Venetian Bembo the poetry of Petrarch and the prose of Boccaccio, both Tuscan, are the models for writing Italian literary works. In 1520, five years earlier, Raphael had died and the Renaissance found the crowning glory in his work. In the sixteenth century, therefore, we mean an idea of ​​Italy beyond the territorial divisions and local dialect, in a unity that sees protagonists, with the first great writers, the artists, from Giotto to Michelangelo, painters and sculptors who speak Italian. And the Renaissance marks a united Italy before the Risorgimento. But in this process what is in the vision does not erase the differences that manifest themselves in the different interpretations. And, after the long process of unification, how to see the primacy, as a reference model, of the Tuscan language and art, use the research that identifies the different geographical areas on a formal and expressive level. These "genetic" peculiarities of the different areas of the Italian "artistic geography" will be verifiable also on the occasion of the new Neapolitan exhibition that will offer the visitor an overview of the subjects faced by the artists, from the sacred to allegorical and mythological representations, from the genre of portrait to eyes of the landscape and still life.

More info at http://www.itesorinascosti.it