Carlo Carrà, The daughters of Loth, 1919. Oil on canvas. MART, VAF-Stiftung Collection

Trento – More than seven centuries have passed since Giotto reinvented Italian painting, paving the way for the great Renaissance revolution. Today at the MART in Rovereto an exhibition is preparing to tell how, far from being confined to the past, the master of Vespignano was a source of inspiration for artists for a good part of the twentieth century.

From 8 December until 19 March 2023, over 200 works will stage a journey through the history of art in the wake of the Tuscan painter and architect. Born from an idea of ​​the director Vittorio Sgarbi and curated by Alessandra Tiddia, Giotto and the twentieth century will bring together in the halls of the Trentino museum the protagonists of Italian painting such as Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Mario Sironi, Gino Severini, Massimo Campigli, Ubaldo Oppi, who in the first part of the century traced in the thirteenth-century colleague the main witness of an artistic tradition to look at, as well as masters linked to the international environment of the avant-gardes such as Henri Matisse.

But it doesn’t stop there. Works by Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Mark Rothko, Josef Albers will illustrate the rest of the story, showing how even in the second half of the century Giotto’s art was the basis of the work of some of the most innovative artists on the world scene. And there will be forays into the art of the present, with the American James Turrell and the British Tacita Dean – just to name a couple – ready to collect and update once again the legacy of the medieval master.