in art and literature between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Andria, Castel del Monte
July 16th - November the 1st 2010

When as we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,
Ê Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein.
(Dante, Inferno, V, 127-138)

It is well known how love puts the individual into a state of renewal and rebirth, placing him or her in contact with vital aspects of oneself that have not been awakened till then. However that same love has the capacity to disempower, since it clearly demonstrates the human contrast between absolute and contingent, eternal and transient: the feeling of being stronger and internally richer - produced by the ability of Eros to awaken our most secret sources of energy - often conflicts with a temporary state of disequilibrium due to the vulnerability generated by the yearning for one's beloved, who can never be fully ours. Love then becomes passion, the sweetest suffering. And it was amour-fou - this passion capable of changing into a form of madness - that took the central stage in opera and in the artistic expressions that derived from it during the romantic period. Castel del Monte then became the very centre of exposure to dedicated love: it was a place that symbolised the royal power of Federico II, the Emperor who transferred to Italy - through the poetry of the Sicilian school - the Provencal conception of the fin amour, courtly love. In fact, the theme of love is as central in the lyric poetry of the thirteenth century as it is in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the relevant differences, and also of central importance was the female figure, the domina of courtois production and the eroina (heroine) of nineteenth century operatic production, the victim of contrasting passions driven to extreme consequences - voluntary or involuntary death - and the protagonist in dramas set to music which, with the names of Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi, brought fame to Italian opera throughout the world. In the exhibition are mythological fables and pastoral dramas, whose protagonists are the couples Rinaldo and Armida, Erminia and Tancredi, Aurora and Cephalus, Eneas and Dido in the paintings of the Banca Carime Collection; these bear witness to the eighteenth-century view of love as irrational, self-deceptive or something to be cured by magic or propitiatory stratagems. A vision that is modified when passes to the love-passion of the nineteenth century, which selects as its heroines Isotta, Francesca da Rimini and Juliet, darling victims of a medieval period insensitive to their fragile love, a love not permitted by the social order. This same moral order that denied love to Piccarda Donati, Lucrezia Borgia, and Manzoni's character Gertrude, and that led to the violent deaths of Pia de' Tolomei, Desdemona, Anne Boleyn, unjustly accused of adultery and victims of their own lovers. A bird's eye view of figures overcome by emotion - created by writers such as Francesco Hayez, Piccio, Tranquillo Cremona, Gaetano Previati - celebrates the unstoppable power of love which, at its most passionate, bears with it an extraordinary onslaught of poetry and of irreverence, a creative surge capable of making the essence of love itself coincide with rebellion, beguiling the lover-protagonists themselves into the belief that they can achieve infinity together, if only for an instant.