Le Isole Incantate. Vedute dei Domini Borromeo Da Gaspar Van Wittel a Luigi Ahston

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the pithy remark of one of the first travellers to visit the Isola Bella, in 1686, while work was still under way: "When all is finished, this place will look like an Inchanted Island", wrote Gilbert Burnet, offering an ideal introduction to the era of the unmissable visit to Lake Maggiore made by European gentlemen during their Grand Tour.
As happened with the rest of Italy, travel literature found an immediate and successful echo in visual renderings of the same locations, which promptly played a central role in the interest for modern view painting, offering another way of enjoying Italian landscapes. This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue seek to convey this dual level of the fortunes of the Borromeo Islands, juxtaposing figurative documentation and literary and archival records between the late seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries.
We can thus enrich our knowledge of the history of art in Northern Italy, and expand an area still greatly neglected by scholarship and the realm of exhibitions.