Games and Artistic Illusions: from Lega and Carrà to Casorati and Manzù

Curated by Massimo Bertozzi

Following the evocative exhibition on the 20th century in Carrara and the rediscovery of the Italian Belle Époque, for summer 2025, the Giorgio Conti Foundation is presenting the exhibition In gioco. Illusione e divertimento nell’arte italiana 1850–1950 at Palazzo Cucchiari in Carrara, opening Saturday, June 28 and running until Sunday, October 26, 2025. More information available at mostraingioco.it

Curated by Massimo Bertozzi, the exhibition promises to be a major event, with impressive numbers and truly surprising content.

Approximately 110 works will be on display—including bronze and wooden sculptures—by around 80 artists, 56 of whom have never been exhibited at Palazzo Cucchiari before, confirming once again its status as one of the top venues for temporary exhibitions focused on the 20th century.

The quantity of works and artists is matched by their quality. Highlights include Girls Pretending to Be Ladies, an 1872 oil on canvas by Silvestro Lega from the Istituto Matteucci in Viareggio; The Carriage, painted by Carlo Carrà in 1916, from the MART in Rovereto; a 1911 portrait of Cesare Lionello by Felice Casorati; The Carnival Wagon by Alberto Capogrossi, on loan from the Presidency of the Republic; and The Gypsies by Massimo Campigli. Notable sculptures include The Wandering Singer by Medardo Rosso, The Ballerina by Giacomo Manzù (1938), The Swimmer by Marino Marini, The Wrestler by Emilio Greco, and The Racewalker by Francesco Messina.

Ultimately, the team at Palazzo Cucchiari has created a kind of “amusement park” told through a corpus of artworks that spans from children mimicking adults in the paintings of Lega or Gioacchino Toma, to the proud or disappointed boys with their toys in works by Fausto Pirandello or Riccardo Francalancia; where traditional games like hoop rolling live on in Massimo Campigli’s paintings; where the miniature world of toys appears in works by Casorati and Corrado Cagli; and where the archaic world of jugglers, circus folk, and carnival masks is immortalized by Mosè Bianchi, Gino Severini, Capogrossi, Alberto Donghi, Primo Conti, and Antonio Ligabue. The exhibition concludes with depictions of sports and challenges of fate, featuring the Futurist dynamism of Mario Sironi, Gerardo Dottori, and Roberto Iras Baldessari, the modern truths of Carrà, the playful plasticity of Medardo Rosso, and the athletic feats of Francesco Messina and Marini.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections, not arranged chronologically: it begins with “Everyday Pastimes and Recreation”, followed by “Growing Up and Learning: Child’s Play”, “Entertainment and Shows: The Invention of Leisure Time”, and finally “Challenges, Competition, and Fate”.

According to Roger Caillois, for every artist, play is an “uncertain island”—that is, as curator Massimo Bertozzi explains, “a middle ground, between a reality forced to conform to the organization and rules of everyday life and an elsewhere, fictional but inspired by reality, where rules have been reorganized and rewritten. A ‘magical reality’ where the curiosity of discovery, the joy of invention, and the flair of creativity negotiate with the conventions that bind rule and whim together—the same dialectical tension that unites play and art.”

But why play?

Play is, above all, a children’s activity: they enjoy mimicking adult “games” and thus learn the “craft of living”, of growing up.

Play is a free and separate activity, in a closed context and within a limited time; in this sense, it is recreational—like children’s play—and it shares many affinities with the creative work of artists.

If playing is pretending to live differently, then painting and sculpting are like playing in another way.

In their mindset and behavior, artists are somewhat like children: they work with imagination and fantasy, and their creative instinct follows only self-imposed rules—just like any other “rule of the game”.

Play appears in the painting of every era, though almost always with allegorical intent, never for its own sake: there’s a stark difference between the ethical message of Caravaggio’s players and the social commentary of 18th-century French paintings of gamblers.

Only in the 19th century—the age of history, realism, and modernity—do artists begin to focus on play as just one of many human activities: a diversion, a pleasant pastime, a break from “daily worries” for everyone—aristocrats and peasants, priests and soldiers, women and children.

With the dawn of the new century, artists too feel the call to regenerate the human condition. Many aspire to a new world, driven by a desire to return to nature, nostalgic for a lost paradise, yearning to escape reality, and especially longing for childhood—the age of innocence—destined inevitably to be portrayed as the age of play.

It’s as if there’s a need to make up for the damages of modernity, which created new forms of escapism by institutionalizing old forms of entertainment: street games, circus acts, and live performances—from commedia dell’arte to classical theater, and the popularization of music, which evolved from salon music to tabarin and cafè chantant, or by reviving the “world turned upside down” of carnival.

Thus, society discovers “leisure time”, which in a dynamic and entrepreneurial culture cannot remain “wasted time” but must be transformed into socially useful and productive time.

Artists devoted themselves to this, with a narrative intent that was amused before being amusing, often unconcerned with avant-garde trends, extending playful allusions from Verismo well into the introspective and primitive retreats of the “difficult years”.

Soon enough, play itself, as challenge and competition, evolved into a form of performance—with the rise of all types of sports and the legalization of lotteries and casinos.

The cult of speed, the thrill of risk, and the emerging phenomenon of sports fandom made sports and gambling defining aspects of 20th-century Italy—an ever-present source of inspiration for artists, whether through the distorting lens of the avant-garde or the structured formalism of the Italian Novecento movement—who found in the world of play specific themes for both promoting and critiquing the quality of modern life.