On the centenary of the birth of Sergio Vacchi (1925-2016), the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte celebrates one of the most heretical and visionary protagonists of twentieth-century Italian painting. A solitary and unconventional artist, Vacchi remained on the margins of dominant movements, faithful to a poetics rooted in new emotional dimensions, achieved through an ever-deeper exploration of his own psyche. From early still lifes to the informal gesturalism of the 1950s, through the return to figuration in the 1960s and its metaphysical tensions, his painting narrates a constant dialectic between eros and matter, history and myth, reason and vision. In Rome, in close contact with intellectuals such as Guttuso, Fellini, and Volponi, he developed major pictorial cycles dedicated to Frederick II, Galileo Galilei, and the Second Vatican Council--reflections on power, knowledge, and artistic freedom of expression. Vacchis works have fascinated enthusiasts and collectors, among them Sophia Loren, who for Architectural Digest was photographed in the entrance of her Florida home, holding a cup of coffee beneath her portrait painted by Sergio Vacchi. In his later decades, having withdrawn to Tuscany at Castello di Grotti--today the seat of the foundation bearing his name-- Vacchi developed painting cycles of great symbolic power. His canvases remain a testament to art as moral resistance, capable of revealing our inevitable inner unrest.
Since 1995, Eike Schmidt has held positions at major international institutions, including the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Sothebys in London. From 2009 to 2015 he served as a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and subsequently as Director of the Uffizi Galleries until 2023. Since 2024, he has been Director of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. Alongside this, he has been active in academic and administrative roles, with appointments at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Fondo Edifici di Culto, and the Igor Mitoraj Museum Foundation.
Ursula Benvenuti, an art historian, is Secretary General of the Sergio Vacchi Foundation, recognized by the Region of Tuscany since 1998. The Foundation is headquartered at the Castello di Grotti, a few kilometers from Siena, which was purchased by the artist in 1996. The site is particularly well suited to hospitality and to national and international exchange: it consists of the splendid castle and several adjoining buildings, some of which are used as accommodations, making it possible to host scholars from universities and foreign academies.
