Northern Lights

The exhibition Northern Lights represents a fascinating journey into Flemish and Dutch painting between the 16th and 17th centuries, with special attention to its reception and luck in Piedmont. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the precious Mossi di Morano collection, donated in 1828 to the Royal Albertina Academy: a collection of works that forms one of the founding nuclei of the current Albertina Art Gallery. This extraordinary collection, which has never been studied in depth since the 1980s, includes works by Italian artists such as Philip Lippi, Francesco France, Mattia and Gregorio Preti, but above all an important body of Nordic paintings, which probably came into the possession of the Mossi family by the end of the seventeenth century.

The exhibition itinerary highlights the long tradition of Nordic collecting in Piedmont, evidenced by the Savoy ducal collections since 1635, by the collection of the Prince Eugene of Savoy-Soissons acquired in 1739, up to the nineteenth-century collections of the Marquises Falletti of Barolo and of Carlo Oreste Strocco. Alongside the works from the Mossi donation, visitors can admire significant works by Nordic dolls active in Piedmont as Jan Miel e Pieter Bolckman, and local painters who were influenced by it: from Pietro Domenico Olivero at Angela Maria Pittetiup to John Michael Graneri.

Particular emphasis is placed on the two tables by Maarten van Heemskerck, an artist who has now been rediscovered internationally, which are a focal point of the exhibition. The exhibition is completed by a nineteenth-century appendix showing how the Nordic heritage continued to inspire Piedmontese art well beyond the Baroque period.

A unique opportunity to discover unpublished works, restored or never exhibited before, thanks to the collaboration with Italian and foreign experts, within the evocative rooms of the Albertina Art Gallery.