As part of the Museum's traditional participation in the Archivissima. The Archives Festival initiative, dedicated to the theme "Carnet de voyage," the Museum, with the exhibition "Massimo d'Azeglio, a Traveling Painter," aimed to introduce the public to a lesser-known side of the great politician and thinker, displaying a small album of his drawings and watercolors. This exhibition is not a tribute to Massimo d'Azeglio's pictorial experience, albeit significant and often recognized, but rather an opportunity to take a different look at his creative experience, in which image and text, writing and painting, intersect. Drawn from life during his many travels and sojourns throughout Italy, the sketches document the places, moods, and passions of a politician-artist, novelist, painter, and man "born seductive," as his father-in-law Alessandro Manzoni described him.
The theme of travel recurs throughout the album, with his constant travels across the peninsula; these are physical journeys that simultaneously mark an intellectual and creative evolution. A compulsive learner, Massimo painted from life, developed relationships with French landscape and view painters, and devoted himself to the study of music, history, and literature. His artistic activity gradually fused painting and writing, becoming a notebook for his political activity, as evidenced by the last sketches of his notebook, drawn in Monte Berico during the First War of Independence.
Thus, in the exhibition, the physical object of the album becomes a diary and a tale not only of places, but the narration of an inner journey.
Images
from the exhibition
Press
