Alphonse Mucha and Giovanni Boldini at the Palazzo dei Diamanti: Art as a Celebration of Beauty
From March 22 to July 20, 2025, the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, becomes the stage for a visual and symbolic encounter between two masters of female representation: Alphonse Mucha and Giovanni Boldini. Celebrated artists in the Paris of the Belle Époque, they came from different backgrounds but shared the same obsession: portraying women as the absolute protagonists of a new era of freedom, elegance, and power.
LEFT: Alphonse Mucha, The Seasons: Summer, 1896, Series of four decorative panels, Color lithographs, 103 x 54 cm each, © Mucha Trust 2025; RIGHT: Alphonse Mucha, Rêverie, 1897, Color lithograph, 72.7 x 55.2 cm, ©Mucha Trust 2025
The grand retrospective dedicated to Alphonse Mucha occupies the 11 rooms of the Rossetti wing and brings together around 150 works, including paintings, posters, photographs, objects, and studies. But the true thread of the exhibition goes beyond the decorative aesthetic for which Mucha became world-renowned. It also reveals the artist as a political thinker, a philosopher of imagery, and a defender of the cultural identity of his homeland, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), during a time of intense geopolitical change in the heart of Europe.
LEFT: Giovanni Boldini, Princess Eulalia of Spain, 1898, Oil on canvas, 202 x 101.5 cm, Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini Museum, © Ferrara, Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, photo by Luca Gavagna – the images; RIGHT: Giovanni Boldini, The Worldly Singer, c. 1884, Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm, Collection of the Fondazione Estense, on loan to the Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art of Ferrara, © Ferrara, Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, photo by Tiziano Menabò
Although they worked in different artistic languages, Mucha and Boldini shared a rare ability to translate the values and contradictions of their time through the female figure. On one hand, Mucha idealized woman as a modern goddess—connected to nature, spirituality, and the cycles of life. On the other, Boldini sharply portrayed the real woman of high society—self-assured, dressed by the finest Parisian maisons, and endowed with a magnetic aura that he enhanced through fluid brushstrokes and sinuous curves. In their own distinct ways, both were visual chroniclers of a moment in which women were beginning to claim a more active role in the public sphere.
Mucha was not only the creator of the famous “Mucha style,” which captivated Paris with his ethereal posters of Sarah Bernhardt and decorative panels of idealized women. He was also an intellectual deeply committed to the Slavic cause, culminating in the monumental creation of the “Slav Epic” —a series of large-scale paintings that narrate the history of the Slavic peoples with an emotional and symbolic weight rarely associated with an artist known for ornamentation and lightness. Far beyond Parisian glamour, the exhibition reveals how, for Mucha, beauty was a tool of resistance and spiritual elevation.
LEFT: Alphonse Mucha, The Arts: Painting, 1898, Deluxe edition, Series of four decorative panels, Color lithographs on silk, 60 x 38 cm each, © Mucha Trust 2025; RIGHT: Alphonse Mucha, Lance Parfum "Rodo", 1896, Color lithograph, 43.1 x 32 cm, © Mucha Trust 2025
On the other side of the Palazzo, in the rooms of the Tisi wing, a more intimate and introspective exhibition is dedicated to Giovanni Boldini, Ferrara’s illustrious son who conquered the world with his swift and vibrant brushstrokes. Featuring over 40 works selected from the Museo Boldini collection, the show dives into the universe of female portraiture—a genre the artist pursued obsessively throughout his life in Paris. Boldini was able to capture, like few others, not only the aristocratic features of his sitters but also their attitude toward the modern world.
In his portraits—such as that of Princess Eulalia of Spain or the enigmatic “Lady in Pink” —there is an almost cinematic dynamism. His paintings seem to freeze a fleeting gesture, a glance, an unfinished phrase. It is the ephemeral instant of an emancipated, elegant, sensual, and often restless woman. Contrary to the notion that Boldini merely flattered his sitters, the exhibition reveals how the artist used portraiture to construct complex, often ambiguous female characters, in tune with the winds of modernity blowing at the turn of the century.
LEFT: Giovanni Boldini, Woman in Black Looking at the "Pastel of Mrs. Emiliana Concha de Ossa", c., 1888, Oil on panel, 80.5 x 64.5 cm, Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini Museum, © Ferrara, Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, photo by Luca Gavagna – the images; RIGHT: Giovanni Boldini, The Lady in Pink, 1916, Oil on canvas, 163 x 113 cm, Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini Museum, © Ferrara, Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, photo by Tiziano Menabò
Although rarely mentioned together in art history books, Mucha and Boldini engage in a profound dialogue. One was a master of graphic composition, the other of gestural movement. One saw woman as a cosmic symbol of beauty and hope; the other, as a mirror of the spirit of an era. Yet both celebrated femininity as a creative force— a symbol of a world in transformation.
The curatorial vision of Tomoko Sato (for Mucha) and Pietro Di Natale (for Boldini) creates a visual narrative that invites visitors to admire masterpieces but also to reflect on the role of art as a means to imagine possible futures.
 Exhbition View: Alphonse Mucha e Giovanni Boldini at Palazzo dei Diamanti
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