Many painters of the nineteenth century used antique costumes as models to make their paintings more realistic.
With Mosè Bianchi this practice finds for the first time a concrete demonstration, because he is the only Italian artist whose collection of garments, mostly dating back to the eighteenth century, has been preserved.
Through the direct juxtaposition of textiles and paintings, one can observe which costumes were used to create those neo-eighteenth-century genre scenes that were so fashionable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Italy and across Europe.
Curated by Ilaria De Palma