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On this wall, visitors can admire two works by two of the undisputed giants of 20th-century Italian painting: Carlo Carrà and Mario Sironi. Having weathered the turbulent years of the early 20th-century avant-garde movements, the two became the pillars of a profound figurative revival, characterised by the spirit of a ‘return to order’ and a revival of the great Italian artistic tradition. However, on observing these two works, created in the 1950s at the height of the artists’ maturity, it becomes clear how that shared starting point evolved into two distinctly different stylistic directions: a rigorous, geometric composure on the one hand, and a powerful, restless experimentation on the other. Carlo Carrà’s work perfectly embodies the most lyrical and solid expression of his personal ‘return to order’. The female figure, seated in profile, is captured in an intimate, everyday moment; yet the scene sheds all anecdotal character to become pure, eternal form. Carrà strips the anatomy and the surrounding space of any superfluous detail, seeking an essential volumetry evocative of the Tuscan masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as Giotto and Masaccio. The application of colour lends the painting a monumental stability and a silent calm, in which the woman’s body becomes an architectural element frozen in time. Of a completely different nature is the Composition by Mario Sironi, an artist who never abandoned a textural and dramatic painterly style, adhering to the Novecento movement, theorised by Margherita Sarfatti. The work features a composition typical of the artist, with various compartments within which human figures and objects take shape. On the right stands out a nude seen from behind, pure white and statuesque. Sironi’s brushwork here is dense and feverish; the colour is sombre, interrupted here and there by sudden flashes of light. There is none of Carrà’s serene harmony, but rather a layering of memory that transforms the painting into a construction site of archetypal and timeless forms. Together, these two works document the extraordinary complexity of Italian painting in the last century. Through the theme of the nude and the female figure, Carrà and Sironi demonstrate that the lesson of the return to order was not a static formula, but an open field: on the one hand, the quest for a classical and reassuring purity; on the other, a tragic and existential reflection on the fragmentation of modern form.