The exhibition entitled PORTRAITS OF WOMEN features over seventy original paintings from prestigious private collections and museums. Curated by Antonio D’Amico, the exhibition is organised by ARTIKA, in collaboration with the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum and the municipality of Conegliano. Trenitalia is the exhibition’s Official Green Carrier. I am Daniel Buso from ARTIKA and I will be guiding you through the exhibition with my voice.
For much of the nineteenth century, women occupied a central yet clearly defined place in painting. They were mothers, wives, muses or lovers; they belonged to the home, the drawing room, high society or the artist’s imagination. Beauty was both their privilege and, at the same time, their limitation. Towards the end of the century, however, this model began to crack. Alongside the idealised figure, a more independent, seductive and sometimes unsettling woman emerged: the femme fatale, capable of exerting a power over the male gaze that hovered between desire and fear. During the Belle Époque, this transformation became more apparent. Theatres, cafés, department stores and social haunts offered new opportunities for encounters and freedom, whilst urban life took on unprecedented rhythms and forms. In the works of Giovanni Boldini, women move through this world with elegance and self-assurance, part of a modernity defined by movement, fashion and social life. But beyond the salons lay another experience, less conspicuous yet no less significant. Federico Zandomeneghi captured on canvas young women from the middle classes engaged in the tasks of work and daily life. In the naturalness of their actions, an image of womanhood emerges, one that participates in family and economic life. The 20th century accelerated this change. Wars and profound social upheavals drove millions of women to take on unprecedented responsibilities. Work took them into factories, offices and the service sector, making their role in public life both stable and visible. The language of painting, too, underwent a transformation. The female figure lost the idealised smoothness of the nineteenth century and took on a more concrete, at times austere, form. In the works of Mario Sironi, she becomes a presence imbued with solitude, toil and dignity, now far removed from the image of a beauty conceived solely to be contemplated. The works brought together in this exhibition convey the intensity of this journey with extraordinary emotional power. They are women imagined and desired, but above all real women who struggle, resist and emancipate themselves. To observe them today is to recognise, behind every painted face, the breath of the times that shaped them, and to discover how women cease to be merely the subject of others’ gaze to finally become the authors of their own stories.