Date: 09/25/2015

Exhibition venue: Galleria Berardi – Corso del Rinascimento, 9 – 00186 Rome
Organization: Berardi Gallery
Event: Karl Brullov (1799-1852) – Drawings and sketches

The work of Karl Brullov (St. Petersburg 1799 – Manziana 1852), one of the major protagonists of international Romanticism, is inextricably linked to Rome. Arriving in the Eternal City in 1823 with a scholarship, in 1833 the artist conceived and created his most famous work The Last Day of Pompeii (1833, St. Petersburg, Russian State Museum), a painting that received acclaim throughout Europe conditioning the artistic poetics of his time.

After long years spent in his homeland, Brullov gravely ill in 1849 embarks on his last trip to Rome, which he considers his chosen homeland and where he will be buried three years later in the non-Catholic cemetery of Testaccio. The exhibition is dedicated to an album of 42 sheets and some sketches from a private collection relating to this last period of the artist’s life. The corpus of drawings was already published in 1991, on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to the masterpieces of Russian art preserved in the Italian collections.

Its importance consists in thoroughly documenting the production of Brullov’s last phase, illustrating his first ideas, thoughts and sudden rethinking of his creative process. Where possible, the oil paintings to which the drawings refer will also be presented or published in the catalog.