Nuova Scuola di Colorito

Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera A surprise awaits visitors to the Pinacoteca di Brera: the Academy’s young artists are painting in the gallery once more! After an initial experimental phase, on 7 November 2019 the Pinacoteca di Brera is inaugurating the Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera, an educational programme that will take place […]

Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera

A surprise awaits visitors to the Pinacoteca di Brera:
the Academy’s young artists are painting in the gallery once more!
After an initial experimental phase, on 7 November 2019 the Pinacoteca di Brera is inaugurating the Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera, an educational programme that will take place throughout the exhibition rooms every Saturday morning from 10 am to 1 pm.
Equipped with easels, palettes, paints and brushes, the “apprentice painters” will give visitors the opportunity to witness the complex work of “making” a painting, in an analytical journey of discovery, decoding the different layers that make up the pictorial matter, enabling them to examine in detail the creative process that leads to the realization of a painting. The silent pictorial scene, in which colour evidently plays a leading role, will be accompanied by the gestures of painting, the patient and laborious work of the artist, who, along with the acrid and persistent notes of linseed oil, will fill the museum’s rooms with original, intense emotions.
The project, conceived and implemented by Ignazio Gadaleta, artist and professor of Painting and Colour at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, represents the ideal pictorial response to the numerous initiatives that in recent years have brought drawing back to the centre of the experience in the Pinacoteca (drawing kit, Piera bag, draw bench) with such an extraordinary success. Particular attention will be paid to the use of colour that the great Venetian School of the sixteenth century imposed on every other region of Italian art. In his Manifesto del colore (Rome 1918) Giacomo Balla promoted it as “a privilege typical of Italian genius”, a sort of bridge crossing history in the creative relationship between the Antique, the origins of modernity and the continuous present. However, it is necessary to understand the distinction between the colour of things and the “colorito” (the use of colour) as a filtered process of the linguistic construct of painting. Since the origins of artistic literature, “colouring” indicates the result of the painters’ actions, in synergy with “drawing” and “invention”, set out so long ago by Paolo Pino in his Dialogo di Pittura (Venice 1548). The first to distinguish between colour and “colorito” was Lodovico Dolce with his Dialogo della pittura intitolato l’Aretino (Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Venice 1557), and the distinction between couleur and coloris was later taken up and developed by Roger De Piles in Dialogue sur le coloris (Nicolas Langlois, Paris 1673).
Brera already had a Scuola del Colorito in the past, established in 1794 and directed by painters Martin Knoller and Giuseppe Gaudenzio Mazzola. The School was abolished in 1834 and since then the term “colorito” has disappeared from general awareness, as much among painters as among historians and art critics. After about two hundred years, the examples of the great masters exhibited in the new and exciting layout of the Pinacoteca suggested to the painter Gadaleta the idea of testing, with some students, a modern-day approach to pure colour in painting, oscillating between a radical use of pigment and digital virtuality.
Poetically called the Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera (New Brera School of “Colouring”), the project is supported by James M. Bradburne, director of the Pinacoteca, within the framework of a vision intended to encourage a productive dialogue between the institutions that make up the rich cultural variety of Palazzo Brera, and to configure the museum as a living research laboratory, continuing the recovery of its finest traditions: “Because Brera is not a collector’s hortus conclusus, a museum of ‘preciousness’: Brera is a national gallery with a vast historical fabric, created by Napoleon for the “education of the people” in line with a profound enlightened thinking that we, the heirs, cannot betray” (Fernanda Wittgens).
Winsor & Newton, the renowned manufacturer of the high-quality colours for the fine arts since 1832, has taken to the initiative with great enthusiasm, offering its generous support through the supply of its Artists’ Oil Colour and Professional Water Colour materials to support the activities.
The presentation of the Nuova Scuola di Colorito di Brera will be held on Thursday, 7 November at 5.30 pm at the Pinacoteca di Brera’s Sala della Passione. For the occasion, after the presentation, a demonstration of the activity will take place in the Pinacoteca’s exhibition rooms which will be open from 6 pm to 10.15 pm (last admission 9.40 pm) at a cost of € 2.

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