The Mag Alto Garda museum's Spring

With Altitudini della visione. Il digradare del paesaggio dalle Alpi al Garda. Fotografie 1880-1930 (Altitudes of vision. The softening of the landscape from Alps to Garda | Photographies 1880-1930), with La figurazione del paesaggio. Affinità di vedute in Pinacoteca (Figuring landscape. Affinities of views in the Pinacoteca)and with an exhibition and research programme that flows into the project Segantini and Arco, the Mag Alto Garda museum lets its Spring proposals bloom in its two museums of Riva and Arco.

The 2017 exhibition season of the MAG opens, in fact, with a new arrangement on the ground floor of the Museum in Riva del Garda, designed to host projects related to photography and video that can evoke the lake landscape outside.
The opening is scheduled on Saturday 18 March at 18.

The first project, Altitudes of vision. The softening of the landscape from Alps to Garda | Photographies 1880-1930, becomes part of this new "scenography" by presenting an itinerary that, through images, descends from the highest peaks of the Alps and the Dolomites to Lake Garda: it is a selection of photographs from the period 1880-1930 from the archives of the MAG and a movie by Pietro Marelli, dated 1912, Italian Beauties. Trento and surroundings, which has been restored by the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Italian Film Library Foundation).
The exhibition is ideally divided into four sections - arranged in part on luminous screens and partly on a stand – which correspond to four stages of the descent from the peaks to the lake: first, "a silent conversation with the sun", documents the glaciers and peaks between 3900 and 1500 metres above sea level. The images tell how the high mountains appeared to travelers in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

Then, "the first built-up areas" immediately below the peaks, with the alpine lakes including Misurina and Dobbiaco appeared as modest villages in the years between 1880 and 1930. In the background, the imposing Dolomites frame small villages, such as Cortina d'Ampezzo, Pinzolo, Brunico. This section includes a selection of images from the photo campaigns by Josef Gugler of Bolzano, Bernard Johannes and by John the Baptist Unterveger; between 1881 and 1882 the latter created a sequence of views of Trentino on commission by the Alpine Club SAT.

After that, we descend to "the valley floor", where we can enjoy very different views: the Cembra valley with its terracings photographed by the Pedrotti brothers; the springs of Peio; views of Toblino, Levico and Caldaro lakes; the rocks that mark the Sarca valley. Also in this section there are photos by G.B. Unterveger, Alois Beer, Friedrich Würthle.

Finally, "a show of wealth and grace" completes the whole exhibition. Near Lake Garda the Alpine landscape meets and blends with the Mediterranean Scrub; here are peculiar rocks, vegetation and the light is different.

La figurazione del paesaggio. Affinità di vedute in Pinacoteca (Figuring landscape. Affinities of views in the Pinacoteca) proposes a new study on the collections, suggesting affinities between the "views" on display, which are sometimes distant in historical times and for their artistic codes, but some other times are exactly matching.

Among the new artworks that the MAG Art Gallery has recently acquired, are the oil on canvas by Giuseppe Canella, Limone, Lake Garda (1845), the View from the Arco castle by Anton Hlavacek (1880), as well as paintings and historical photographs depicting the landscapes of the Garda of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, which belong to the Museum's archives.