Review: La Galleria Nazionale

By Sophie Chin, Third Year English

La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea keeps the complete collection of international and Italian art from the XIX to the XXI century.

A virtual visit contains contemporary international and Italian art from over the last two centuries.

The collection is eclectic and illustrious: the works range from neo-classical Italian sculptures of grandeur of swooning angels and female martyrs, to Alberto Giacometti’s haunting surrealist ‘the standing woman, and to Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabrielle Rosetti’s famous/ infamous image of Jane Morris (famously dubbed as his muse). One thing that appears to unite these paintings is the artistic engagement with female subjects over the course of the mid 19th century to present day.

Rosetti’s painting of Jane Morris, for example, captures her looking into the distance, appearing otherworldly, with her lip curling downwards into a semi-snarl. This is situated amongst many portraits of rather demure, aristocratic Italian women robed in pearls, ruffles and lace, which were painted a couple of decades prior to the portrait. Jane Morris is much less decorated than her well-dressed counterparts, wearing plain blue silk, with most of the canvas consumed by her profile, long neck, flowing hair with a slight glow around the edges... she is the archetypal muse. Where the painters of her counterparts two decades earlier concerned themselves displaying colonial material wealth and aristocracy dripping off the hands and necks of their subjects, in this photo of Jane Morris, portrayed as the odd lady out, we see a shift towards a practice of looking back to the past. A movement which involves self-containing romantic notions of the female profile as the artists’ muse. Centrally, a prioritization of the aestheticization of the feminine body speaks to representations of the artist’s desire to capture and thus memorialize the essential beauty of the subject’s face, without embellishment.

Darker representations of the female profile, such as The Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia, for example, are glaring examples of the aestheticization of death. This aestheticization of death has subsequently led to a depiction of violence as something that is united with beauty, specifically, here, female beauty. She hangs in a swooning pose, as if almost overcome with emotion and not dead. One of her breasts is revealed as her clothing has fallen loose...

Feminist writer and author Michela Murgia looks at how centuries of male artistic history have distorted representations of desire when it comes to viewing the female body. She writes, “The idea of eroticism that emerges in relation to art is a deadly and chaotic idea in the fact that women’s bodies and their nakedness are directly connected to death and destruction.”

*The Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia,* untitled

I laughed when I saw the ‘Grande donna’ sculpture standing in an adjoining room, looking out obliquely at the state of it all. In conjunction with her forbearer, she represents a kind of existential questioning. It seems fitting for her to be placed in opposition to the hung female martyr, implicitly entering into a conversation that throws the object viewing of women’s bodies in artistic spaces into question.

Now, in a six-year program bid to hand over the mic to female voices and artists, La Galleria Nazionale has concentrated its online exhibition to the representation of female artists among its gallery collections. Directly looking to challenge the gallery gender gap, it directly counters the women as subjects to women with control over shaping their image. Some of my favourite artists from this online exhibition include:

Hanna Höch, a German Dada artist best known for her work of ‘photomontage’, a technique where pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions stuck-together of other widely produced media’ - key themes: androgyny, political discourse, and fluid gender roles.

Ana Mendieta: The Body and the Earth. Considered one of the most influential Cuban American artists of the post WW1 era, her major themes include a linkage between the human body and primordial nature. Her earth sculptures reproduce the artist’s body with natural materials, tracing the contours of the artist’s female figure. Key themes: physicality, identity, natural immersion.

Lastly, we have Linda Fregni Nagler. Her work stems from a love of historical photography imbuing her pictures with bright colours and textual layers, giving a sense of heightened drama and dynamism to the piece. By re-touching these images, she restages historical narratives entering into dialogue with historical photographers about the continual practice of interpretation and re-interpretation. In her own words, she writes,

“I think in very simple terms: here are similar artifacts, someone made them for a reason, and they are certainly part of a larger system. I’m interested in the idea of being able to reactivate a material that is “extinct” in itself, to give voice and visibility to peripheral or marginal events in the history of images through different forms of “translation”. Her artistic interventions, therefore, are loaded with questions surrounding authorship, legitimacy, and the notion of time.

Review: La Galleria Nazionale

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