Gaetano Turchi

(Ferrara 1817 – Florence 1851)

Torquato Tasso in Sant’Anna, 1838

Oil on canvas, 180 x 130 cm
Museum of the Nineteenth Century, inv. 79

Between the end of the 1820s and the beginning of the following decade, the romantic myth of Torquato Tasso, a poet with a tragic existence, experienced widespread popularity in Europe and Italy. The figure of the man of letters inspired many artists including the young Ferrara artist Gaetano Turchi, a leading exponent of local history painting, who chose to depict the most dramatic moment in Tasso’s life.

The canvas documents the reaction to the outdated neoclassical model through a language that evokes the ancient splendor of Ferrara by recovering themes and subjects from Este culture. Tasso is depicted alone and brooding, in his cell in the Sant’Anna Hospital where he was imprisoned at the behest of Duke Alfonso II d’Este. The tension of the scene is resolved in the psychological rendering of the character, in keeping with the trends of Romantic painting.

It is probably the first modern painting to enter, in 1838, the collections of the Pinacoteca civica ferrarese, founded in 1836 at Palazzo dei Diamanti with the ambition of bringing together ancient and modern works for educational and didactic purposes.