Firenze 1911-1922. La pittura italiana del Sei e Settecento in mostra

1922 Was the year in which Ugo Ojetti opened the Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento in Palazzo Pitti, the centenary of which occurred in 2022. Ojetti's exhibition defined a scientific and operational model. In Florence, for the first time in the twentieth century, the experts - including a Roberto Longhi who was then thirty-two years old - told the regional 'artistic stories', as had begun to be done, in 1911, with the Mostra del Ritratto Italiano. Between 1911 and 1922 it is possible to summarize the planning of Ugo Ojetti in charge of the theme of the great retrospective exhibitions of ancient and modern art. Analyzing a series of documents (notes, reports, newspaper articles, interviews, exchanges of letters) seemed to be a useful step in defining the characteristics of a country, Italy, which, in the years marked by two world wars, decided to deal with the question of 'cultural heritage'. This was done to make it an instrument of political consensus, but also to respond to the new guidelines regarding the relationship between private collectors, museums and exhibitions. In this context, Ojetti had the merit of understanding how the model of nineteenth-century European exhibitions, mainly organized by private associations or individual collectors, could be adapted to the needs of the new century. Perhaps his fundamental intuition was to combine an often very high quality of the objects on display (the Louvre Museum agreed to lend Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin in 1922 just as the Prince of Liechtenstein granted his Lute Player as early as 1911), with a large 'audience'. In this way Ojetti contributed to making Florence a real cultural capital but, at the same time, he created the premises for the problematic open-air museum we know today.