Hayez exhibit

This morning, my friend Beatrice and I saw the Hayez exhibit at the Galleria d'Italia in Milan (it is near the Teatro Alla Scala).
Despite the bad weather (it was a rainy and windy day), we have spent a nice day, full of art and beauty.

When we talk about Hayez, we are referring to the Romanticism, even if in Italy this movement had always been influenced by Neoclassicism and we can also find this element in Hayez's paintings.

In fact we can see a lot of his artwork which have, as protagonists, characters of the Greek and Roman myths as Ulysses, Laocoon, Alcinous, but also some others based on Holy Bible (Jesus, Esau and Jacob, Mary Magdalene...), on Shakespeare's dramas (Romeo an Juliet) and based on historical facts and persons of the XIX century ( Napoleon, Gioacchino Rossini, Alessandro Manzoni...).

Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni

In the exhibit there was also the portrait of the Unnamed, a character of the most famous novel written by Manzoni, "The Betrothed".

the Unnamed

He is a sort of Romantic hero, which lives a terrible struggle due to his past full of evil actions that he wants to leave behind. When he was youger, he had an indomitable will and fierce in front of bullying, he was proud and powerful, he searched for solitude and independence.

But now he is old and he has a crisis of faith, which make him to think to change, rejecting his villain past (and, finally, he managed to). Great men understand their mistakes and they try to get better, even if it can be hard.

When I bumped into this portrait, I felt strange: I read the novel some years ago, but I hadn't thought about what he looked like and when I saw it, it seemed to put the final piece of an incomplete jigsaw to me.

The most famous painting of Hayez is this one

The kiss

Apart from the analysis of this painting (it's the symbol of the spirit of Risorgimento, the love for homeland, the unification of Italy - the colours of the Italian tricolour of the man's clothes and the blue dress of the woman which represents France are connected with the Plombières agreement between the two nations), the extraordinary thing I appreciate is the rendering of the cloth (and the jewels, for example in the portrait of Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso), which it is visible in a lot of Hayez's works: they are so realistic that they makes you want to touch them to feel their softness.

I am happy I saw this exhibit. As George Bernard Shaw said, "without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable".

Bye for now

Yours, Silvia