The exhibition is dedicated to the prestigious collection of 19th-Century Tuscan paintings belonging to Mario Taragoni. Financial magnate, economist, great art collector, man of culture with a passion for Tuscan painting and a strong belief in the ideals of the Italian Risorgimento, Mario Taragoni managed to put together, between the 1930s and the 1970s, an extraordinary collection of works by the Macchiaioli, based almost entirely on a keen study of critical essays, and originating out of his deep love of art.

Organised by Antonio Paolucci, who supervised a board of curators made up of Silvestra Bietoletti, Josie Taragoni and Stefano Cecchetto, the show was supported enthusiastically by the collector’s family, which actively collaborated in order to gather together and make available a large number of works to the public.

A well-read and cultivated collector, Taragoni carefully selected the paintings of the Macchiaioli according to his personal tastes, favouring those which appealed to his refined sensibility and not following any fashionable trends, although he was always well aware of the social and cultural dynamics at play, and he participated to the events, often traumatic and extreme, taking place in his days.

For his purchases he trusted, rather than the recommendations of critics and art dealers, the authors of literary essays, who, in the first decades of the 20th Century, promoted the rediscovery and revaluation of the Tuscan painters working in the 19th Century, most notably Ugo Ojetti, Mario Tinti and Enrico Somaré. Through such essays he became acquainted with the work of Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega, but also of Signorini, Ferroni, Mario Puccini, as well as with the poetic paintings of Armando Spadini, which are permeated by a vibrating sentiment of familial love, and which he later acquired.

Thanks to this exhibition, some of the most celebrated paintings by the Macchiaioli, which had not been available to the public for years, can now be admired. Among them: Ritratto di Signora (Portrait of a Lady); Donna con scialle rosa (Woman with pink shawl); La signora Clementina Bandini con le figlie a Poggiopiano (Mrs Clementina Bandini with her daughters in Poggiopiano) by Silvestro Lega; La preghiera della sera (The night prayer); Tempo di pioggia (Rainy season); la Gramignaia (The weeds woman) and Sosta dei Lancieri (The lancers’ rest) by Giovanni Fattori; Il Ghetto di Firenze (The Florence Ghetto) by Telemaco Signorini; Cappello di paglia (Straw hat) by Armando Spadini; Vele al sole (Sails under the sun) by Mario Puccini, as well as numerous other masterpieces of the 19th-Century “Tuscan school.”

The critical success encountered by the Macchiaioli gave rise to various initiatives devoted to the protagonists of the movement, notably the great retrospective on the 19th Century at the 16th Venice Biennial in 1928, where their paintings took centre stage, and which is documented with a special section in the exhibition.

This is therefore a unique chance to view, gathered in one place, such an important collection, as well as to experience, along with the high pictorial quality of the exhibited works, the intellectual fervour which animated Mario Taragoni, a sensitive and refined collector who was among the first to realize the modernity of these painters.