From 21 February to 28 June 2026, great art returns to the San Domenico Museums in Forlì with the new exhibition BAROCCO. Il Gran Teatro delle Idee.
Restless forms, alternating rhythms, disorder, the shipwreck of the senses, the exaltation of celebration, the theater of existence: this is Baroque. A cultural phenomenon that spans the 17th century and marks the beginning of our modernity. This is where science was born and the primacy of consciousness was established.
It was a magical moment in art. A vivifying fever that led princes and sovereigns to become promoters of a great pictorial and literary, urban and architectural renewal. Things triumphed. Collectors and patrons encouraged the most diverse genres.
The exhibition BAROCCO. Il Gran Teatro delle Idee (BAROQUE. The Grand Theater of Ideas) is dedicated to this extraordinary era, to all its artists, and to the influence they have exerted and continue to exert on artistic production.
The exhibition, which is the result of a detailed and in-depth study, aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Baroque culture: the role of Rome and the European courts, the protagonists who shaped its forms, the role of the patrons who supported its development, and the strategies of representation of power that determined it.
To fully understand its origins, the exhibition will begin by comparing the depiction of drama in the Hellenistic age and the spatial experiments of late Mannerism, moving on to Caravaggio's radical realism, which brings the gaze back to a more intimate dimension.
Rome, the hub and cradle of this extraordinary period, will be the starting point for a narrative that will then extend to Europe, following the spread of the Baroque style and the changing international political context, especially in the second half of the 17th century.
This creative fervor is evidenced by masterpieces by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, the two Gentileschis, Luca Giordano, Guercino, Guido Reni, Van Dyck, Andrea Pozzo, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Zurbarán, and many others.
The 20th-century rediscovery of the Baroque is crucial to understanding part of the artistic revolution of the early 20th century. The works of Lovis Corinth, Francis Bacon, Giovanni Boldini, Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Giuseppe Ducrot, Fausto Melotti, and Umberto Boccioni offer visitors a unique opportunity to grasp the surprising dialogue between two distant but intimately connected eras, the 17th and 20th centuries, under the sign of formal and existential restlessness.
200 masterpieces – from the Albertina (Vienna), the Prado Museum (Madrid), the Vatican Museums (Vatican City), the National Galleries of Ancient Art (Rome), the Uffizi Galleries (Florence), and the Capodimonte Museum and Royal Park (Naples), among others (Naples) – will bring to life a journey divided into ten sections, set up in the spaces of the San Domenico Civic Museum, in a journey that starts with the charm of the ancient and ends with contemporary resonances.
