- The history of Signorini starts from Florence and from here radiates elsewhere, but, as anticipated, the Tuscan city never ceased to be a point of reference for them. It was said at the beginning that the exhibition was born from the discovery of an unpublished correspondence between John and Telemachus (which, in truth, also extends to other members of the family, namely Leopold and Paul, two other sons of John): the letters will soon be published by Elisabetta Matteucci, but it is still possible to anticipate that the letters emerge from the figures of two artists very attached to their hometown and perfectly integrated in the cultural and artistic milieu of Florence.
There is also a further consideration that accompanies the relationship between Signorini and Florence: the reflection on their link with the city writes the curator, "favors the analysis of the figurative sources at the origin of the formation, as well as suggesting an evaluation of the urban theme so investigated as to become identifiable. It is also research that, emphasizes Elisabetta Matteucci, "could not overlook the influence of the city in the social sphere. All of these themes are examined in detail in the rooms of the Florentine exhibition, in the context of which the image of the city also becomes a means of "narrating the different seasons that determined the evolution of a style in relation to the urban and social changes in Florence and also to the countless solicitations coming from the international community that had identified the city on the Arno as the most evocative landing place for the escape of sentimental travelers", underlines Carlo Sisi in the catalog.
Thus, after a brief dedicated to family portraits (including a beautiful unpublished portrait of Aegisthus, the eldest of John's three sons, and a portrait of a thirteen-year-old Telemachus, painted by Aegisthus himself and once again on public display almost one hundred years after the last occasion), the first image of Florence to emerge is that of Giovanni's views.
A precise picture of Giovanni Signorini as a "Vedutist" was offered by the scholar Silvestra Bietoletti on the occasion of the exhibition at Palazzo Zabarella 2009 (and reiterated by the art historian herself on the occasion of this exhibition): If his early landscapes still reflect the seventeenth-century tradition of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, a more thoughtful meditation on Tuscan views of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (starting with those of Giuseppe Gherardi, present at Palazzo Antinori with two works that are compared with those of Signorini) translates into a more serene and objective painting, à la Canaletto (with whom Signorini's father shared the habit of taking it from life) but with a more heartfelt interest in the picturesque, with the contrasts of light that sometimes know how to be marked almost to become the main protagonists of the composition and, underlined Bietoletti on the occasion of the Padua exhibition, without losing the contrast with an image of Florence that, often dreamy, sometimes manages to blend the real with the ideal.
The Florence exhibition masterfully exemplifies all these passages with a precious succession of works on loan from private collections (like most of the paintings that make up the exhibition): it starts with two marinas strongly indebted to the art of Salvator Rosa and made up of soft lights and dark colors, with views of intense lyrical flavor (this is what happens in the Navy with two sailboats: the two boats that are leaving the port of Livorno proceed towards a sunset that illuminates the entire scene with a warm and enveloping light), and we move on to works such as the View of the Arno from Ponte to Carraia, animated by intentions that we could say more "scientific" than previous works (and between the two phases there is a break of just five years) and with a look that changes completely reference, from the moment you migrate from the landscapes of central Italy of the seventeenth century to the northern view.
For the curators, Signorini's reassuring views also have political implications (they become allegories of the harmony that reigns under the rule of the Lorraines), and when the time of the Grand Duchy was drawing to a close (especially following the reactionary turn that followed the uprisings of 1848), Signorini's paintings acquired a more nostalgic and melancholic dimension: A clear example of this is a work from 1856, La mietitura d'estate, where the most classic of the city's panoramas, seen from the hills to the south (so that the profile of the Duomo's dome, Giotto's bell tower, Arnolfo's tower and the spire of the Badia Fiorentina stand out), forms the backdrop to a sort of rural idyll that almost dissolves into the reddish light of a warm June sunset.
- A nucleus of works that completes the discourse started with the exhibition in Padua, since at Palazzo Antinori there are more works and they extend the look also to the works closer to the romanticism of the beginnings.
To be continued.