This year Florence celebrates Japanese art and culture in the Pitti Palace, the Florentine palace that, as far back as 1585, welcomed the first Japanese ambassadors to reach Italy.
The sumptuous rooms and the most prestigious premises of the Palace, now divided into three museums, are involved in this magnificent event devoted to the arts and culture of the archipelago of the Far East, suggestively entitled Japan. Land of enchantments.
On the ground floor of the Pitti Palace, the former summer quarters of the Grand Dukes, now the Museo degli Argenti, hosts the exhibition Of Line and of Colour. Japan, its arts and the encounter with the West; the Sala Bianca, in the Palatine Gallery on the first floor of the palace, hosts the exhibition The elegance of memory. The decorative arts in modern Japan.

Running at the Gallery of Modern Art is the exhibition Japonism. Evocations of the Far East from the Macchiaioli to the Thirties.
This is the first show in Italy devoted to this exciting artistic movement.
An artistic phenomenon that has been investigated in depth in other countries, including France, England and the United States, Japonism – that is Western arts that took over motifs inspired by Japanese art – also had a profound influence on Italian art between the mid-nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. This was inevitable, considering that Japan in all its facets was ‘discovered’ by westerners only in the nineteenth century: the Far Eastern archipelago had effectively been consciously secluded from the rest of the world for over two centuries, opening up only around 1860. Since then, partly as a result of Japanese pavilions at the World Fairs and through the Americans and Europeans who sojourned in the land of the Rising Sun, the passion of westerners for the art and culture of Japan spread widely, in some cases to the point of becoming an authentic mania.
Not only did Japanese artefacts and costumes begin to dominate the fashion of the time (consider, for example, the fans, kimonos and screens), but even more importantly the artists found in Japanese art – and above all in the polychrome woodcuts of artists such as Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige – a source of stylistic and thematic inspiration to renew their language. This input was exploited by the leaders of the European avant-garde movements, including Whistler, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Monet – represented at the exhibition by a ‘Japonist’ masterpiece granted on exceptional loan by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The same was true of many important Italian artists, they too swept up in the winds of radical change that were raging through western art at that time.
The Japanese influence extended to Italian artists who became popular abroad, such as De Nittis, and also figures who were at the time experimenting new pictorial frontiers in Italy, such as the Tuscan Macchiaioli, with Fattori, Signorini and D'Ancona in the lead.
Japonism appeared in works by artists from every region of recently-unified Italy, extending its stylistic influence right through to the first decades of the twentieth century. From Tranquillo Cremona to Vittore Grubicy, from De Pisis to Cambellotti, from Michetti to Balla and from Boldini to Cavaglieri; it also inspired the greatest manufactories of the time, such as Richard Ginori, the glassworks of Murano and the ceramics of Galileo Chini.

Works by all these artists are present in the exhibition, alongside a large number of Japanese artefacts, above all Ukiyo-e prints – many of them originating from Italian nineteenth-century collections – in order to underscore the analogies and affinities.
There is a particularly evocative section devoted to Japonism in Italian theatre: two works characterised by Japanese themes, Mascagni’s Iris and Puccini’s Butterfly, continue to enjoy enormous success all over the world. The exhibition, therefore, offers the opportunity to admire works of extraordinary artistic value, fruit of the fascination of Japanese art, its fresh delicacy and its subtle decorative motifs that were integrated in such a perfect and original way into the Italian artistic lexicon.