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With this sensual oil on canvas, the exhibition tackles one of the most provocative and hotly debated issues in Italian painting at the turn of the century: the depiction of the academic nude and its transition towards an explicit and modern eroticism.

Grosso, a lecturer at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, is renowned not only for his extraordinary technical mastery but also for his ability to challenge the prudishness of the bourgeois society of the time through images of a proud and deliberately transgressive femininity.

The work on display here belongs to the mature phase of the artist’s career and represents the coherent development of a thematic exploration to which he devoted himself with great success. Just a few years earlier, in 1895, Grosso caused a huge scandal at the first Venice Biennale with his famous painting Il supremo convegno, in which a crowd of nude women surrounds a coffin. In the academic circles of the time, the nude was not regarded as a mere copy from life, but rather as the most complex pictorial challenge and the highest and purest expression of art. However, the painter succeeded in dismantling the cold, classical idealisation of this genre to place it within a psychological and sensual context.

In this painting, the allure lies not in the anatomical depiction of the female body, but in the dramatic and enigmatic contrast between the face of the model—whose name we do not know—mysteriously left in shadow, and the statuesque splendour of her body bathed in light, which gently enhances her sensual and captivating pose. The artist transcends tradition by incorporating accessories drawn from the erotic imagery of the Belle Époque, such as Parisian stockings and a fan decorated with oriental motifs. These elements can be interpreted as attributes of a femininity aware of its own seductive power, which does not submit to the observer’s gaze but boldly commands it.

Within the exhibition, Giacomo Grosso’s Nude marks a fundamental break with female iconography. The woman sheds her clothes and the reassuring roles of mother, wife and literary heroine. The female figure asserts herself within the exhibition space as an icon of pure physical freedom and intellectual provocation, paving the way for the freer experiments that would characterise the early 20th century.