The exibition

The exhibition that the City of Verona, with the exceptional collaboration of the Musée du Louvre, is organising in Verona at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia from November 2009, will be the visual and spatial demonstration of the famous saying that ‘Corot is the last of the classics and the first of the moderns’.
Three big sections with about 115 works from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, from Poussin to Picasso, will show how Camille Corot obtained his knowledge of landscape technique along with many sources of aesthetic inspiration from the great Italian, French and Dutch classical tradition of the seventeenth century. We will then see how he developed the motifs drawn from that tradition – trees, the rendering of mountains and distance, rivers, streams, urban views, buildings in the heart of the country and so on – developing a style that was sober, realistic, luminous and based on a synthesis of painting. We will finally discover how Corot’s art had a profound influence on first the Impressionist generation, then the Fauve artists and the Cubists, in both the representation of nature and the treatment of the human figure.
Going back to the source of classical tradition, before noting the fundamental influence of Camille Corot on modern art, the aim is to emphasise his role as a conduit; or the primary place of his work in the painting of the nineteenth century as a link between past and future, between tradition and modernity.