Sogno Mediterraneo / Mediterranean Dream (Sergio Vacchi)

On the centenary of the birth of Sergio Vacchi (1925–2016), the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte celebrates one of the most heretical and visionary protagonists of twentieth-century Italian painting.

On the centenary of the birth of Sergio Vacchi (1925–2016), the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte celebrates one of the most heretical and visionary protagonists of twentieth-century Italian painting. A solitary and unconventional artist, Vacchi remained on the margins of dominant movements, faithful to a poetics rooted in new emotional dimensions, achieved through an ever-deeper exploration of his own psyche. From early still lifes to the informal gesturalism of the 1950s, through the return to figuration in the 1960s and its metaphysical tensions, his painting narrates a constant dialectic between eros and matter, history and myth, reason and vision. In Rome, in close contact with intellectuals such as Guttuso, Fellini, and Volponi, he developed major pictorial cycles dedicated to Frederick II, Galileo Galilei, and the Second Vatican Council—reflections on power, knowledge, and artistic freedom of expression. Vacchi’s works have fascinated enthusiasts and collectors, among them Sophia Loren, who for Architectural Digest was photographed in the entrance of her Florida home, holding a cup of coffee beneath her portrait painted by Sergio Vacchi. In his later decades, having withdrawn to Tuscany at Castello di Grotti—today the seat of the foundation bearing his name— Vacchi developed painting cycles of great symbolic power. His canvases remain a testament to art as moral resistance, capable of revealing our inevitable inner unrest.