Thanks to an agreement between the Municipality and the Province of Nuoro, which entrusted its management to the MAN Museum in 2016 the Francesco Ciusa Museum reopened to the public .
The rooms dedicated to the famous artist from Nuoro (1983-1949) bring together the group of large sculptural plaster casts , owned by the Sardinia Region , the nucleus of works of the MAN Museum , referable above all to the more mature production, and a group of other specimens from both public and private collections .
A set of almost fifty works, representative of the artist’s varied activity, which includes significant works such as The Return , There Bell , The slinger, The Cainite, the reconstruction, integrated with original marble fragments, of Monument to Sebastiano Satta – erected in 1931 and later dismantled – until the famous Mother of the murdered, a symbolic work of Sardinian figurative culture, which the sculptor presented at the Venice Biennale in 1907, receiving critical acclaim.
The sculptures presented within the museum itinerary reflect the most intense moments of Ciusa’s research, from his beginnings in the early twentieth century to the end of the 1940s. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ciusa had the opportunity to attend, since 1899, the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, alongside masters such as the sculptor Domenico Trentacoste, the Macchiaiolo painter Giovanni Fattori and the engraver Adolfo De Carolis, of whom he reworked not only the languages, among realism and symbolism, but also the anarchist and socialist ideas.
A path of intense reflection and exchange with important personalities, such as Giovanni Papini, Plinio Nomellini, Galileo Chini, thanks to whose contribution the sculptor’s work was able to reach an original synthesis, capable of blending the tradition of Sardinian stonecutters, with its deep-rooted values and recurring themes, and academic sculptural techniques. Considered the initiator of modern sculpture in Sardinia , Ciusa managed to reconcile two distant realities, the agro-pastoral and the urban, giving voice to the Sardinian popular world , hitherto unheard.
The Sardinia 900 route
Together with the rooms dedicated to Francesco Ciusa, the spaces of the former court of Nuoro host a new exhibition itinerary dedicated to the artists of the Sardinian pictorial school of the first half of the last century , which sees them reunited the most important works from the MAN collection .
Born from the merger of four public collections (Province of Nuoro, Municipality of Nuoro, Chamber of Commerce of Nuoro, Provincial Tourism Board) and subsequently grown thanks to a careful policy of acquisitions and loans, the MAN collection contains works by artists born or active in Sardinia, covering a time span from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. A corpus of over 600 works which includes some of the the most important authors , as well as some key works of art history in Sardinia , as Sa ria by Antonio Ballero, Faith by Mario Delitala (part of the decorative cycle of the council hall of the Municipality of Nuoro), Woman with fruit by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna, Farmer at the source by Giuseppe Biasi and numerous others.
Works that allow you to travel theand most important stages in the history of art of the first half of the twentieth century in Sardinia, characterized by a rediscovery of traditional iconography, customs and daily rituals, through which the artists aim to promote a new vision of the island, celebrating its native values, its origins, the myth of the uncontaminated land and the genuineness of the Sardinian people, contrasted with the homologation of modernity.
The itinerary ends ideally with the cubist work The shadow of the sea on the hill , by Mauro Manca , which inaugurated a new phase of painting in Sardinia, marking a watershed between the figurative experiences of the regional school and the abstract ones that would become established from then on.
Recently the “Sardinia 900” route has been enriched with two new exhibition rooms dedicated respectively to Mario Delitala and to the “Sardinians of Isia”: Salvatore Fancello, Costantino Nivola and Giovanni Pintori .
The room dedicated to Mario Delitala, which precedes the start of the actual journey, gives the public an integrated vision of the famous woman Expulsion of the surrenderer , recently restored, together with four allegorical lunettes, created in 1924, which made up the decorative cycle of the council hall of the Municipality of Nuoro . The decoration takes up some themes dear to the fascist regime that had recently established itself in Italy (family, faith, work, homeland), while the canvas of “The Expulsion of the Arrendadore”, inspired by an episode in the history of Nuoro in 1772, becomes a symbol of the redemption of a people and the affirmation of its identity.
The second new exhibition room, located on the first floor, is dedicated to the so-called “ Sardinians of Isia ”, the famous school established by the Umanitaria di Milano in Monza, which, from 1922 to 1943, was an exceptional hotbed of talent, where notable figures such as Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Pio Semeghini and Giuseppe Pagano taught. Thanks to a scholarship from the Nuoro Chamber of Commerce, Nivola, Fancello and Pintori also arrived there between 1930 and 1931. artists who have had an impact on the figurative culture of the twentieth century and which, within the history of Sardinian art, constitute a significant moment of innovation and experimentation .
