Art Nouveau

The tree of life, the work conceived and created by Gustav Klimt as a mosaic frieze for the dining room of the Stoclet House, in Brussels, between 1905 and 1909,  represents, together with the house itself, designed by Josef Hoffmann, with its furnishings designed by other artist-craftsmen of the Viennese laboratory (Wiener Werkstatte), an element of that total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), longed for by the artists of the Art Nouveau, especially from those who founded the Austrian Secession with Klimt in the late nineteenth century and until the tragedy of the First World War.The Klimt tree, allegory of the eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth of nature and life, has its roots - as well as in the history of art in general (just think of the various representations of the biblical tree of knowledge of good and evil) - in the revaluation of the Gothic movement that arose in England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

That movement represented the aesthetic, but above all ethical, social and religious demands of those artists, architects and writers who reacted to the mechanization of work, to the enslavement of man to machine rather than machine to man, to the prevalence of the quantity of industrial products. on their quality, the exploitation of human and natural resources to the detriment of the beauty of the landscape, of the natural rhythms, of the wholesomeness of the air and, therefore, of the entire community. Among the architects involved in the Gothic Revival, especially in the so-called "Ecclesiologist" phase, the complex and tormented personality of August Pugin (1812 - 1852) stands out, author, among other things, of scenographies for Covent Garden, of drawings for the furnishings of Windsor Castle and for the Parliament building; he designed several churches and some private homes, including his own house near Salisbury; but more important than his work as an architect are his apologetic essays of the Gothic style, considered as the maximum expression of the spirituality of art (Pugin converted to Catholicism in 1834).

Some of his principles will be made his own by John Ruskin and William Morris, both convinced of the superiority of ethics over aesthetics and of the educational and social function of the work of art:"In a building there must be no elements that are not required by convenience, construction requirements or decoration.All ornaments must be an enrichment of the essential structure of the building.The value of a building depends on the moral value of the architect.A building has an independent moral value which is superior to the aesthetic value ".John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) is also a passionate apologist for the Gothic style and considers medieval society as an ideal model to which contemporary society should return; in the Middle Ages, in fact, morality and religiosity were more important values ​​than the aesthetic one; aesthetic sensitivity can vary in time and space, but according to Ruskin, morality, based on the very essence of man, remains inviolate in changing circumstances and fashions.In the Seven lamps of architecture (1849), that is the seven principles (sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, obedience) on which architecture is based - or should be based -, we read, in the chapter dedicated to “ Lamp of Sacrifice ":"All architecture aims to influence the spirit of man, not only to offer a service for his body. Architecture is the art that styling and adorns buildings erected by man for any use, so that seeing them can contribute to his health, his vigor and his pleasure of an intellectual order. " Whatever the functions and practical purposes of the buildings (devotional, celebratory, civil, military or domestic), they must - or should - still reflect the virtue of the artist who interprets the profound, arcane, divine beauty of nature; for Ruskin, the ideal work of art is the coherent result of the forms of an organic and harmoniously organized society. Hence the dream of an impossible return to the forms of life of pre-industrial society; in the Stones of Venice (1853) Gothic is taken as an example of religiosity and morality of an art in which the community recognized itself immediately.

Decadence begins when art detaches itself from ordinary life, as, according to Ruskin, it happened in the Renaissance; one can well understand the consonance with the pre-Raphaelite poetics and with the work of Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828 - 1882), the most significant poet and painter of that movement, son of a Mazzinian patriot exiled in London. Even the Pre-Raphaelites thought that the decline of art began with the Renaissance - in particular with the academic "Great Manner" represented by Raphael - and that it was necessary to go back to the time when artists sought to imitate nature in greater glory than God and not the works of art of classicism to the greater glory of art (and of man). Ruskin also wrote an educational text for aspiring artists (Elements of Drawing and Painting, 1857) in whose preface we find this important consideration on the relationship between art and industry: “… it seems to me that art applied to industry with industry itself. For example, the skill with which an invented worker designs and models a beautiful cup is true artistic ability, while the ability with which others copy and then multiplies that cup thousands of times is manufacturing ability; the faculties which will have to make the worker capable of drawing and elaborating his original work should not be cultivated with the same education system that should be adopted to enable another worker to reproduce the maximum number of approximate copies of that work, in a given time. More: it is harmful to limit the artist's education to direct examples of industry ".

Ruskin's ideals and teaching on poetry and on the nature of Gothic exerted a decisive influence on the artistic and literary, as well as ideological and political-social work of William Morris (1834 - 1896). He too fascinated by Gothic cathedrals, dedicated himself to the study of architecture, drawing and painting; he met the painters Burn-Jones and Dante Gabriele Rossetti in Oxford and entered the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, where he distinguished himself for his social commitment and for his willingness to return to manual work that dignity and that aesthetic value that the use of machines in industry had failed. Between 1859 and 1860, with the help of his friend architect Philip Webb, he built his home in the neo-Gothic style, the Red House, which can be considered as the manifesto of his conception of architecture and furnishings. Persuaded of the importance of the so-called "minor arts" or applied, in 1861 he founded the "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co", a company that produced furnishing fabrics, tapestries, ceramics, stained glass windows, objects of common use of refined workmanship , as a reaction to the deterioration of the current aesthetic taste due to the production on an industrial scale and the consequent diffusion of all the same, anonymous and vulgar artefacts. Through the activity of the company and then with the exhibitions of the "Arts and Crafts" movement, Morris had the opportunity to spread his ideas and his graphic innovations (in which appear what will be the characteristic stylistic features of Art Nouveau) and typographical (in 1891 he founded the Kelsmott Press publishing house in Merton Abbey). As a publisher he published, among other things, the complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, in an elegant edition with Gothic characters and pages framed by decorations with floral arabesque motifs and embellished with engravings. Morris' graphic work and his theory of art integrated with the natural and social environment constitute an immediate precedent for Art Nouveau, whose characteristics are already evident in the artifacts designed and designed by the artists of the Arts and Crafts movement: the sinuous and continuous line, the recursiveness of the decorative motifs dominated by the stylization of leaves and flowers, the two-dimensionality of the figures, the calligraphy ... We find these characteristics brilliantly interpreted in the graphic work of a refined artist, esthete and "decadent", such as was Aubrey Beardsley (Brighton 1872 - Menton 1898), who, in his short life, managed to create wonderful illustrations of literary texts such as The Death of Arthur by Thomas Malory, The Abducted Curl of Alexander Pope, the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and, above all , the Salome of his friend Oscar Wilde. With Beardsley's graphic work we are now in the temper of Art Nouveau, as well as with those Belgian and Dutch artists who, rejected by the official exhibition, formed in 1884, an avant-garde group called "Les XX". These twenty artists - including Henry van de Velde, Fernand Khnopff, George Minne, James Ensor, Théo van Rysselberghe, Jan Toorop and Fèlicien Rops - looked at the post-impressionist symbolism of the Pont Aven school, in Toulouse –Lautrec, in Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. The characters common to the painters of the Belgian-Dutch group (symbolism, Beardsley and Japanese print linearism, Gauguin's synthesis, Seurat and Signac's divisionism) are even more evident in the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler and in the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

The new artistic current, called in Belgium and France "Art Nouveau" - whose diffusion was propitiated by the major world exhibitions in conjunction with the spread of the wealth and power of the industrial bourgeoisie - took on different names in the various countries (Modern Style in England and the United States, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernism in Spain, Liberty or Floral style in Italy ...) while retaining some common features, for example: the dominance of the curved line ending with a curl folding (the so-called " coup de fouet "); the drafting of the color à plat; the stylization and recursion of the ornamental motifs; the reference to the plant world; the search for a new beauty in industrial products; the application of this style in every field of art (from architecture to painting, from sculpture to graphics, from domestic and urban furnishings to funerary art, from jewelry to advertising ...); the insistence on flexible and elegant female figures, as in the graphic and pictorial work of Alphonse Mucha.

Among the various curvilinear branches of the Art Nouveau tree - which by now the critics, following the suggestion of Rossana Bossaglia, is inclined to replace with the more comprehensive term of "Modernism" - we must certainly remember the Scottish one of the Glasgow school with his greatest exponent: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, brilliant designer whose fame extended to Europe following the exhibition of the Viennese Secession of 1900, to that of Dresden in 1901 and then at the Turin International Exposition of 1902, which made the city Savoy the capital of Italian Liberty, also thanks to the works of artists such as Leonardo Bistolfi, Davide Calandra, Antonio Vandone da Cortemiglia (the architect of Casa Maffei, in Corso Montevecchio 50, where the bas-reliefs of the sculptor Giambattista Aliotta blend harmoniously with iron beaten balconies and with masonry parts). Nonetheless, the most significant interpreter of Turin and, therefore, Italian Liberty architecture is the architect-engineer Pietro Fenoglio, who, in the same year of the International Exhibition, signs two works that constitute two admirable examples of the new style: Villa Scott , in Corso Giovanni Lanza (chosen by Dario Argento as the location for some scenes of the film Profondo Rosso) and Fenoglio-La Fleur house, in Corso Francia at the corner with Via Principi d'Acaja. Initially conceived as a home for his family (Fenoglio was the first of seven brothers and he never wanted to marry) it was never inhabited by any of his family; Fleur is the name of the first buyer, a French entrepreneur. In this building nothing is left to chance: from the window frames to the elaborate litho-cement reliefs, to the cast iron radiators, to the door jambs, everything has been personally designed by the designer. This is why Casa Fenoglio-La Fleur represents - as Bruno Gambarotta wrote in La Stampa of 24/10/2014 - the manifesto of his architect's poetics. The fusion of the ornaments with the structural parts of the building, the curved shape of the wrought iron parts, the lightness and brightness of the large windows of the bow-window tower that connects the two wings of the building, counterbalance the heaviness of the concrete armed. It is easy to understand why, according to Rossana Bossaglia, "The Fenoglio-La Fleur House remains for us the most beautiful example of liberty architecture in Italy, it remains the purest in the sense of Art Nouveau". The French branch of the tree is also thriving, with its roots in the neo-Gothic visions of Pugin, Ruskin and Morris whose fruits are the school of arts and crafts of Nancy, founded by Emile Gallé, creator of vases, lamps and colored glass objects and decorated with floral arabesques and fantastic zoology figures. A famous creation by Gallé is the lit-papillon, a bed that has a large mother-of-pearl moth as its decoration. The architects Eugène Grasset and especially Hector Guimard were active in Paris, who designed and built the metro stations. But the countries where the tree of Modernism produced its most original and mature fruits, in addition to Belgium, were Austria, Spain and Italy. The Vienna Secession was founded in Austria, founded by the painter Gustav Klimt, in 1897, together with the young architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, both pupils of Otto Wagner, and other artists, including the painter Koloman Moser, who also distinguished himself as a designer of furniture, windows and typefaces. This group of painters and architects, similarly to the Secessions of Munich (1892), and Berlin (1898), detached themselves from the Academy of Fine Arts, formed an independent association with its own headquarters, the Palazzo della Secessione, and its own magazine (Ver Sacrum). The Palazzo della Secessione was built by Joseph Maria Olbrich, between 1897 and 1898, on the trace of a drawing by Gustav Klimt who imagined it as a temple of the arts; above the entrance portal three reliefs of female heads symbolize painting, architecture and sculpture; on the pediment of the building, surmounted by a perforated dome, made up of thousands of bay leaves (the sacred tree to Apollo) in copper covered with golden foils, we read the inscription "Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit" (In every age his art, to art his freedom); the inscription, for the record, was removed by the Nazis in 1938.

The most talented artist of the group was undoubtedly the painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), to whom we owe fundamental works not only for the Viennese Secession, such as the Beethoven Frieze, created for the XIV exhibition at the Palazzo della Secessione in 1902 , dedicated to the celebration of Beethoven; The three ages of the woman of 1905; The kiss of 1907, and, as mentioned above, the frieze of Casa Stoclet, in Brussels, works in which abstraction and empathy, image and symbol blend perfectly in an admirable synthesis between figural and decorative elements.In those same years the movement of modernist architecture developed in Catalonia, in which the figure of Antoni Gaudi emerged (1852 -. 1926). Catalan Modernism, taking up the ideas of William Morris, intends to return to medieval forms, considered the most corresponding to the Spanish popular tradition. Gaudì, passionate reader of the works of Viollet le Duc, adheres to the modernist movement and designs buildings in an eclectic, neo-Gothic and Renaissance style. On the occasion of the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878 he met Count Eusebi Guell, an important Catalan businessman, a man of vast culture fascinated, among other things, by the ideas of Ruskin and Wagner; thanks to Guell's patronage, Gaudì was able to launch himself into daring experiments with various materials and new forms of decoration: Casa Vicens (1878-89), Palazzo Guell (1885-1889), in which the "catenary" arches appear for the first time (a hyperbolic flat curve, whose pattern resembles a chain hanging on both ends and left to hang freely, subject only to its own weight), College of Santa Teresa del Gesù (1889-94) in Barcelona. After these works, the Catalan architect has now developed a completely personal language that clearly distinguishes him from his modernist colleagues also operating in Barcelona, ​​such as, for example, Domènech y Montaner and Puig y Cadafalch. Gaudì's most original works take shape starting from the early twentieth century: Park Guell, where nature, architecture, sculpture and decorations blend organically; the Casa Batllò (1904-07) and the Casa Milà, called la Pedrera (1905-10). Casa Batllò (1904 - 1907) represents the moment of transition from the eclectic youth tests to the absolute stylistic freedom of the last phase of Gaudì's artistic activity. The naturalistic and organic forms used in profusion in the new building (Gaudì had been commissioned to renovate the building owned by the Barcelona textile industrialist Josep Batllò in 1904) are not decorative elements superimposed on the wall surfaces but structural parts of the building itself; in fact, we see bone-shaped columns, a wave-like facade covered with majolica mosaics and colored glass that reflect light like the rainbow scales of the fish. The roof is covered with glazed ceramic tiles in the shape of scales that recall the horny laminettes of reptiles. Other fantastic and naturalistic elements are the windows that go from the second to the fifth floor: they open onto the balconies in the shape of a shell, with wrought iron railings that evoke the masks of the Venetian bautte. In the internal part we find the cavedium, completely covered also with colored majolica with different shades of blue, which takes light from a large skylight. The sinuous ramps of the common staircase rise from the cavedium. Gaudì wanted to stamp his seal both on the outside and inside of the building on the Paseo de Gracia: from the apartments he eliminated corners and right angles, in the house everything is shaped in his style, from the doors to the windows, from the handles to the chandeliers , from the railings to the windows, from the bathrooms to the bells, from the fireplaces to the chimneys ... The house also had an elevator whose cabin was naturally designed, or rather, sculpted in the modernist style interpreted by the great Catalan architect. The original cabin, whose traces had been lost until September 2014, was then replaced by the one that can currently be seen inside the building when, under Franco's regime, it was declared out of the norm. Chance, or luck, has brought the precious artifact back to Palermo, in the home of an entrepreneur who has decided to sell it to a collector, after an expert's expert opinion. And this was how Andrea Speziale was called, who, on the basis of the materials used and the stylistic elements of the work, certainly attributed it to Antoni Gaudì.Gaudì dedicated himself to the Sagrada Familia, conceived rather than as a total work, as an open work in continuous construction, from 1883 until 1926, the year of his death, leaving it unfinished.

In Italy, Art Nouveau takes the name of Liberty - from the name of the London warehouses of Arthur Lasenby Liberty, active since 1895 and specialized in the trade of furnishings, fabrics and furnishings produced by quality English craftsmanship, according to the teaching of the Arts and Crafts - spreads mainly following the 1902 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art in Turin, mentioned above, whose pavilions were designed by the Friulian Raimondo D'Aronco (1857-1932), and to which the architects gave their precious contribution Turin Annibale Rigotti (1870-1968), Pietro Fenoglio (1865-1927), Gottardo Gussoni (1869-1951) ,. Also noteworthy are the Art Nouveau buildings by Ernesto Basile from Palermo (1857-1932), by the Milanese Gaetano Moretti and Giuseppe Sommaruga: the Florentine Gino Coppedè was very active in Rome, Tuscany and Genoa. A branch of Gustav Klimt's tree also flourishes in Italy: illustrators, engravers and graphic designers such as Adolfo De Carolis, a friend of D'Annunzio, Giorgio Kiernek and Edoardo De Albertis who among the other, the typographic layout of the magazine "La Riviera Ligure", and, in some respects, great fin de siècle painters such as Giovanni Boldini (Ferrara, 1842- Paris, 1931), famous, as well as for the views of the crowded streets and squares of the Ville Lumière, for his portraits of ladies from the beautiful Parisian but also Italian world (think of the full-length portrait of Madame Charles Max, 1896, as a model of elegance in the latest fashion and also of female emancipation, or the portrait of the eccentric marquise who inspired the character of Isabella Inghirami in Gabriele D'Annunzio in the novel Maybe that yes maybe that no (1910): Luisa Casati Print with greyhound (1908); as Giovanni Segantini (Arco, Trento, 1858 Schafberg, Engadine, 1899) whose later works influenced by the Viennese Secessionist style: Love the source of life (1896); the Triptych of the Alps: nature, life, death (1896 - 1899); like Gaetano Previati (Ferrara, 1852 - Lavagna, Genoa, 1930), author of works that are affected by the European symbolist climate and the Lombard Scapigliatura: Materntà (1890 - 1891), Il Re Sole (1890-1893), Triptych of the day (1907 ), The fall of the angels (1912-1913); like Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (Volpedo, Alessandria, 1868-1907), whose painting is perhaps the purest example of Symbolist Divisionism: On the barn (1893), Hopes disappointed (1894), Cloths in the sun (1894 - 1895), The mirror of life (1895 - 1898), and the dazzling and essential rising sun (1904); like Plinio Nomellini (Livorno, 1866 - Florence, 1913), who admirably blends Italian divisionism with French pointillism as in Sole e brina (1896) and Gioia tirrena (1914). Even the young Balla (cf. The Worker's Day, 1904 and the young Boccioni (cf. Officine a Porta Romana (1908) were affected by the divisionist and symbolist climate of the late nineteenth century. The pictorial, decorative, ceramic and scenographic work of the Florentine Galileo Chini, the so-called Italian Klimt, (Florence, 1873 - Lido di Camaiore, 1956) undoubtedly represents the greatest expression of Art Nouveau in Italy, as demonstrated by its decorations in the halls of the Venetian Biennials and the decoration of the monumental Terme Berzieri in Salsomaggiore inaugurated in 1923. Another notable exponent artist of Liberty in Italy is the refined Venetian decorator Vittorio Zecchin (Murano, 1878 - Murano, 1947), painter, glazier, designer of tapestries and fabrics in which breathes a Central European air that brings him closer to the artists of the Viennese Secession.

Among the many others that should be remembered I will mention only Faenza Domenico Baccarini (1882 - 1907), who crossed the sky of Italian art at the end and beginning of the century as a meteor, leaving however works that will live in future centuries, such as Notte amorosa (1903 -1904), The Bitta breastfeeding Maria Teresa (1904), La Bitta with crossed hands, Bronze (1904), The bathroom of Maria Teresa (1905), Sensations of the soul, Chalk, (1905), The cousin who makes the stocking (1905).They are intimate works that recall the twilight poetics and certain idylls of the Pascoli Myricae and that reveal a very fine sensitivity and a deep love for art and life. life.

Villar's project, unlike Bocabella's idea, involved a neo-Gothic building with three naves with large windows, cusps, buttresses and flying buttresses. In 1883, however, after completing the crypt, in disputes with colleague Martorell, Villar returned the mandate to Bocabella, who, at this point, assigned Martorell the task of completing the project. Except that Martorell, unexpectedly (and here a believer might even see the hand of God), refused the assignment and indicated, as more suitable for the enterprise, the name of his assistant and collaborator, the thirty-one year old Antoni Gaudi. From that moment on the life of the brilliant Catalan artist "shaper of stone, brick, and iron", as Le Corbusier defined it, intertwined with the ever-changing and still unfinished construction of that Templo in which the stone itself appears truly transformed into a living material in the life of those works of art which, if some barbarian or Taliban or terrorist does not destroy them, go beyond the limits of human life and even those of the time in which they were made; for example: “A building, a Greek temple, does not reproduce anything. It simply stands in the middle of a precipitous valley. The temple encloses the statue of God and in this protective enclosure causes it, through the colonnade, to shine in the sacred region ... The temple, as it operates, arranges and collects around itself the unity of those ways and those relationships in whose birth and death, unhappiness and luck, victory and defeat, survival and ruin outline the shape and course of the human being in his destiny "(Heidegger, The origin of the work of art, p. 27). As is evident, the distance between the geometric harmonies of a Greek temple and the daring technical and formal inventions that make the Sagrada Familia an open and unclassifiable work according to the usual stylistic schemes of art history (Gaudi's style is unique and inimitable) is huge; and yet, both as well as the other are figures of transcendence, human works that speak to us of the divine that is in us and outside us, in the soul and in nature. It is not for nothing that the same atheist anarchists who set fire to the crypt during the Spanish Civil War, did not dare to rage against the Nativity facade, neither against the apse, nor against the four front towers, the only parts built by Gaudi, before he died. , hit by a tram in 1926. Fortunately (or by Providence) the intention of the fanatical Islamist terrorists to blow up Gaudi's masterpiece has remained so. By now the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia wanted by the devoted bookseller Bocabella, whose tomb is in the crypt, has taken shape and the dream of erecting a monument to the Christian faith, thanks to popular donations and the patronage of some private individuals, is slowly being realized . Perhaps, if everything proceeds according to plan, it will be completed around 2026. Antoni Gaudì, from heaven, thanks.

The general executive project was curated by the architect Raimondo D’Aronco, while the execution of the works was entrusted to the architects Annibale Rigotti, Giovanni Vacchetta and Pietro Fenoglio. D’Aronco was responsible for the construction of the Automobile and Cycle pavilion, the Fine Arts pavilion and the Central Palace, where the major exponents of European Art Nouveau found their place. In the Italian sector, the presence of Ernesto Basile from Palermo and the Richard-Ginori ceramics exhibition stand out. Also noteworthy is the importance that the monthly magazine founded in that year by Alfredo Melani and Enrico Thovez "Modern Decorative Art" had for the diffusion of the new style, which would cease publication in 1907.

This Universal Exposition makes Turin the most important driving force of Liberty in Italy, also thanks to the work of artists such as Leonardo Bistolfi, Davide Calandra, Antonio Vandone da Cortemiglia (the architect of Casa Maffei, in Corso Montevecchio 50, where the bas-reliefs by the sculptor Giambattista Alloatti blend harmoniously with the wrought iron of the balconies and with the masonry parts).But the most significant interpreter of Turin and, therefore, Italian Liberty architecture is the architect-engineer Pietro Fenoglio, who, in the same year of the International Exhibition, signs two workswhich constitute two admirable examples of the new style: Villa Scott, in Corso Giovanni Lanza (chosen by Dario Argento as the location for some scenes of the film Profondo Rosso) and Casa Fenoglio-La Fleur, in Corso Francia at the corner with Via Principi d'Acja. Initially designed as a home for his family (Fenoglio was the first of seven brothers and he never wanted to marry) it was never inhabited by any of his family. Fleur is the name of the first buyer, a French entrepreneur. In this house nothing is left to chance: from the window frames, to the elaborate reliefs in lithocement, to the cast iron heaters, to the wooden jambs and to the door handles, everything has been personally designed by the designer.For this reason, Casa Fenoglio-La Fleur represents, in a certain sense - as Bruno Gambarotta wrote in La Stampa of 24/10/2014 - the manifesto of his artist's poetics. The fusion of the ornaments with the structural parts of the building, the curvilinear trend of the wrought iron parts, the lightness and brightness of the large windows of the bow window tower that connects the two wings of the building, counterbalance the heaviness of the concrete armed. We can therefore understand why, according to Rossana Bossaglia, "The Fenoglio-La Fleur house remains for us perhaps the most beautiful example of Liberty architecture in Italy, certainly the purest in the Art Nouveau sense".

by Andrea Speziali in "Femmes 1900" | In the collective imagination, Italian Art Nouveau architecture is often associated with the Ruggeri villa in Pesaro: a striking example of the floral style created between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Decorated centimeter by centimeter of its surface, counted among the chic architectures, its elegance appears in the local and national chronicles of the time. Pesaro is also known for its Liberty production from Molaroni ceramics and other residences in the central-seaside area. Oreste Ruggeri, the pharmacist who will build the cottage that bears his surname and the architect Giuseppe Brega will deliver to the history artifacts and floral decorations of rare beauty. Characters who have interpreted a style in a personal and effective way that are still being studied today. Used for a fresco, for the bas-relief of a cornice or for a monumental caryatid, the female representation is a symbol and identity of charm, beauty and elegance.

One of the founding reasons of Art Nouveau in Italy, from the beginning, was the opposition of craftsmanship compared to industrial mass production. Subsequently, however, it was the artistic current that allowed the elements made in series to have a well-defined aesthetic canon, thus laying the foundations for what is today modern design. This explains the wide diffusion of identical terracotta or cement sculptures made in the main Italian cities and those along the coast of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas.Between Pesaro and Milan, according to the chronicles of the early twentieth century, there were arguments, if we like curious, that jumped to the news. The bronzes of the external portals that gave access to the tavern of Villa Ruggeri were removed because they were considered obscene and replaced in 1921 with simple wooden portals. The author Alfredo Cartoceti had portrayed three female figures without veils on the seashore. In Milan, the Castiglioni palace, also known as "Cà de ciapp", or "house of the buttocks", designed in 1901 by Giuseppe Sommaruga was targeted by the newspaper "petty Guerin" for the naked caryatids at the entrance door.Public opinion sided compact and scandalized against the placement of the two statues, the work of Ernesto Bazzaro, which in the author's intentions were to represent "peace" and "industry". The two figures with too exposed buttocks were considered busty. They were then removed and adapted outside the Villa Faccanoni Romeo, now the Columbus Clinic in Milan.The architect Giuseppe Sommaruga with his palaces, futuristic for the time, conquered the wealthy commission of the Faccanoni with the assignment of numerous villas between Sarnico and the surrounding area and enjoying success in Trieste for the Palazzo Viviani Giberti of 1907.At the main entrance there are always two female figures sculpted by Romeo Rathmann, depicted half-naked with faces that convey serenity.The two figures have been christened "Gigogin" and "Barbara", the custom of humorous baptism very common in the city. The two statues would actually bear the names of two famous "entertainers" of the then neighboring house of tolerance known as the "Villa Orientale", a popular song was also dedicated to them.Even the Liberty fresco in architecture has its own value. For example, in Giulianova in the large halls of Palazzo Re, with a careful restoration the female figures with happy faces and smiles full of positivity represented on the ceiling have been brought to their former glory. We often find Liberty villas, for example in the Romagna Riviera, which had a great wealth of decorations in the series of moldings and caryatids aimed at adorning the building during the Belle Époque period.These will be productions of local artisans who in most cases will make bas-reliefs in terracotta or plaster for molds in which the female face is the dominant subject. From North to South there are artisans who have expressed great creativity and technical ability through the language of Art Nouveau. For example with particularly beautiful figures like the face of a little girl or the young Venus with the typical somatic features of the place. On the website www.italialiberty.it it is possible to find a photo gallery of significant examples from Piemponte, Lombardy, Umbria, Tuscany, Marche, Emilia-Romagna, Liguria and Sicily.

Compared to other European cities, Riga presents numerous examples of buildings that depict the female figure as the main decorative element, often represented with a face rather than a full body.In Brussels, the three-dimensionality is lost and Venus is depicted in external frescoes such as at Casa Cauchie, among the best known Art Nouveau architecture in Belgium.The female figure will be successful in Strbourg at 22 rue du Général Castelnau at the intersection with rue du Maréchal Foch. In a wooden portal with hand-blown colored glass there is a female face carved in wood. This is the most well-known building in the city, designed by the architects Lutke & Backes. At number 1 and 3 of rue Sellénick they designed another building where we find the female face carved on stone at the corners of the architecture. Next to the image of the woman there is also the male one that the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich will propose in Vienna for the villa "Ernst Ludwig House", in full Secessionist style. The Palazzo della Secessioni deserves a mention. Outside it shows three masks with different expressions.Reality, all these, of an itinerary between Italy and Europe arm in arm with female images interpreted through a style that has given the world an incomparable beauty.