The Shared Life

The human aptitude for welcoming and relating that serves as the foundation for the communal life that rules our everyday social structures emerges and develops from the family. Artists from every period have depicted the relationships, affections, difficulties, emotions, impulses and tensions constitutive of the family. Communicating, generating, growing, looking after, raising and caring for are all expressions proper to the human nucleus to which the transmission of life is entrusted. These aptitudes, as reflections of the family, have inspired the social services instituted to sustain it. The activity of institutions, confraternities, organizations and associations to assist and help the needy are evoked in the paintings belonging to the benefactors, who have built up important if little known collections. The works by artists between the XIV century to nowadays - from Pietro Lorenzetti to Picasso, from Medardo Rosso to Mimmo Paladino and also Mario Sironi, Girolamo Induno, Michelangelo Pistoletto - are ordered in an evocative sequence by theme and content. Art not only narrates lived reality, but renders the lively culture of a society emotionally present; in it, in fact, the synthesis of experience and its transmission take place instantly.