Conferences

Masters of the Past and Present – Alessandro Del Puppo, University of Udine.

What happens when an artist like Renato Guttuso comes face to face with the great masters of the past? The scholar of Università degli studi di Udine Alessandro Del Puppo tells us that for the young Sicilian painter, the encounter with Galleria Borghese in 1933 was not a simple courtesy visit, but a technical and spiritual hand-to-hand struggle. Entering the museum as a restorer, Guttuso enjoyed the rare privilege of touching seventeenth-century canvases firsthand, “stealing” secrets that would nourish his painting for the following thirty years. While his fingers were tending to the works of Garofalo and Guerrieri, his eyes were searching for an inescapable point of comparison: Caravaggio. It would have been difficult for a temperament like his to yield to Albani’s cold classicism or to the gleam of Bernini’s marble; it was in seventeenth-century realism that Guttuso found the roots of his cultural rebellion against the regime and the premises of future Neorealism. The point of synthesis of this dialogue is the “Portrait of Mimise” (1938), an effigy of Maria Luisa Dotti, his lifelong companion. Here the homage to Caravaggio is evident, yet profoundly reworked. If in Merisi the relationship between figure and still life is a theatrical play of brazen sensuality, in Guttuso the scene turns inward. Mimise is depicted in a melancholy half-length portrait, her pale face carved by an expressive chiaroscuro that reflects the dramatic tension of 1938, in Rome as in the rest of Europe. The fruit, held in her lap or resting on the table, is not an autonomous entity but an extension of the female figure. Guttuso abandons seventeenth-century analytical naturalism in favor of a dense brushstroke, transforming apples and fruit into vibrating chromatic masses, symbols of a fragile vitality. This masterpiece reminds us that the Galleria Borghese is not only a guardian of the past, but a living laboratory where yesterday’s restoration becomes tomorrow’s avant-garde. This paper forms part of the concluding conference of the Project of Relevant National Interest (PRIN 2022) “The Galleria Borghese and Its Publics, 1888–1938,” curated by Francesca Cappelletti and Lucia Simonato, held at Galleria Borghese on September 29, 2025. At the heart of the study day was the relationship between the museum and its many visitors.