The exhibition includes more than 150 works, of which more than 60 are paintings and drawings by the great French master, Ingres, brought together through international loans – of which a large number have been made by the Musée Ingres of Montauban, which is currently closed due to renovation work – as well as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Petit Palais, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, the Musée de l’Armée and from major Italian museums such as the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano, the Musei Civici di Brescia and private collections.
According to Florence Viguier-Dutheil and Stéphane Guégan “This exhibition aims to overcome a widespread and increasingly negative vision of “neoclassicism”, a term evoking the spectre of pastiche and servile imitation – which does not do justice to an artistic movement that in many ways laid the foundations of our modernity”.
The exhibition is organised in sections:
The first part highlights the invention of the new figurative language that emerged between the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (led by Jacques-Louis David and his students) exemplified by virile bodies and great energy. But the “new man” that these paintings are intended to represent is also expressed through the evolution of the portrait genre.
Napoleon and the Italian Campaign and are the protagonists of the following sections, with some famous portraits including those of Appiani. Also works by Greuze, Canova, Gerard, Finelli, with some drawings by Ingres.
One room is reserved for the figure of Giovanni Battista Sommariva, starting with his portrait painted by Pierre Paul Prud’hon and Canova’s Penitent Magdalene. The exhibition thus leads to the solemn and magnificent portrait of Napoleon in coronation regalia, preceded by a series of preparatory drawings by Ingres.
In the final section, the exhibition takes on a monographic character and is largely made up of works by Ingres from the Museum of Montauban, starting with a series of extraordinary male portraits, followed by drawings and then female portraits, of Venus and Odalisques, as well as a painting of 1818 representing the death of Leonardo da Vinci, all the more significant in the year in which his fifth centenary is celebrated.
An exhibition catalogue (in Italian) is published by Marsilio Editori.
Video (in Italian and French)
Check out some more images in this article in Italian or this.
Opening hours
Mon: 14:30 – 19:30
Tue: 09:30 – 19:30
Wed: 09:30 – 19:30
Thur: 09:30 – 22:30
Fri: 09:30 – 19:30
Sat: 09:30 – 22:30
Sun: 09:30 – 19:30
Address
Palazzo Reale
20100 Milan
Phone number
0039 02875672
(audioguide included / pre-sale excluded)
Full price € 14
Reduced € 12
Members of Museums Lombardy € 10
Special discount price € 6
Family ticket: 1 or 2 adults € 10 / children from 6 to 14 years € 6