Catalog of the exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo Reale from February 3 to June 14, 2026
On the occasion of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Milan is inaugurating another Olympiad, Cultural, in the context of which is the major retrospective on the Macchiaioli, protagonists of a fundamental aesthetic and moral revolution that broke the rigid rules of the academy, paving the way for pictorial modernity.
With more than 90 works from Italy’s most important museums and collections, curated by the three most authoritative experts on the movement, the exhibition reconstructs the brief but intense artistic adventure in a chronological span from 1848 to 1873, proposing a new and deeper reading of this exhilarating experience, projecting it against the historical backdrop of those fundamental years that saw the birth of our nation.
The different personalities, from Silvestro Lega to Giovanni Fattori, from Vincenzo Cabianca to Odoardo Borrani, from Telemaco Signorini to Giuseppe Abbati and Raffaello Sernesi, are outlined, united by an innovative painting technique, the “macchia,” with the ambition to create a common and shared pictorial language in which a country that aspired to achieve cultural unity along with political unity could be recognized.
The catalog elaborates on these elements in the curators’ three extensive essays, as well as reproducing all the splendid works on display, enhancing them with enlargements and details.
Fernando Mazzocca, former professor of art history at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, and the Statale in Milan, is among the leading specialists in the art of the neoclassical, nineteenth-century, and early twentieth-century periods, in the field of which he has published numerous volumes and organized major exhibitions at major Italian and foreign venues since 1978. He has also curated the layout of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palermo and the rooms devoted to the 19th century at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan and Naples.
Francesca Dini, a scholar of painting of the second half of the 19th century, is the author of numerous books, particularly on the Macchiaioli and Giovanni Fattori, and editor of the catalogs raisonné of Vincenzo Cabianca (2020) and Giovanni Boldini (2002). She is a specialist on the Macchiaioli, on whom she has curated numerous exhibitions: from 2000 to 2011 the Castello Pasquini series as scientific head of the Centro Diego Martelli in Castiglioncello, as well as the recent I Macchiaioli. Le collezioni svelate (Rome, Chiostro del Bramante 2016) and I Macchiaioli (Pisa, Palazzo Blu 2022).
Elisabetta Matteucci, a scholar of Italian figurative culture of the second half of the 19th century, is vice-president of the Matteucci Institute and head of programming at the Matteucci Foundation for Modern Art, dedicated to the promotion of Italian figurative culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has been co-curator of several exhibitions, including Fattori. Humanity Translated into Painting (Bologna, Palazzo Fava 2022-23) and Giovanni Fattori 1825-1908. The “genius” of the Macchiaioli (Piacenza, Palazzo XNL 2025).
