"Grande, solenne, blu": il lago di Garda e i pittori tedeschi tra Otto e Novecento

[Autom. eng. transl.] The "discovery" of Lake Garda by Nordic artists is ideally connected as much with the legendary Italienische Reise of Goethian memory, as with the consumerist turn of the late nineteenth-century Mitteleuropean society, in which the foundations of the foreign industry are laid. Lake Garda, then, a glimpse of Mediterranean in the Alps, becomes a symbol of idealistic immersion in a still intact nature, where reality and vision merge, channeling the energies, but also the disturbances, of the contemporary artist, divided between Nietzschean vitalism and illness of the soul. Among the most varied artistic personalities that dot the Garda Kunstgeschichte are the cases of Hans Thoma, whose intense association with the art critic Henry Thode is documented, grappling, at the time, with the rediscovery of Italian Renaissance, and Gustav Klimt who opts for the vibrations of light and color offered by the liquid perspective, paving the way for the research of the abstract avant-garde.