It was the best exhibition I’ve ever been to.
To elaborate: do you remember how you felt the first time you saw a flower in full bloom when you were a kid, or blankets of snow outside your window, or the moon on a late drive home? There is an unparalleled excitement when we see something wonderful yet unexplainable for the first time. This is what Alphonse Mucha’s works made me feel. Personifying flowers, the seasons, gemstones, and the stars interprets these brief yet beautiful encounters to everyday chance we could have on the train, by a cafe, that briefly turns something incomprehensible and faraway into someone intimate and beautiful to us.
If you can’t already tell, I love Alphonse Mucha. But there’s a lot of artists I’ve loved throughout my time as a studio art major — why Palazzo Bonaparte’s exhibition is the best of the best must be much more than just showing an artist I love.
Upon walking into Palazzo Bonaparte, a quaint movie theater was set up with white Victorian-style garden benches and, of course, a giant statue of Hercules staring down at you the entire time. Maybe just in case you forgot you were in Rome. The entrance sets a tone that although the exhibition is about Art Nouveau, an early 20th century movement Mucha forefathered, walking through will be a symphony of many different mediums, even furniture, video, and set design spanning the centuries, from ancient times to present.
The loose parameters of the overall exhibition theme helped me feel Mucha’s paintings transcend their container in genre, time and space. Truly, no matter where you looked, no surface was spared to involve you in the world of Art Nouveau. Although the space was still very much Napoleon’s mother’s 17-century Baroque palace, it evidences the historical context of Mucha’s works, rather than distracts from it.
Together in one space, I could see how Mucha references the idealized, classical forms like that of the Hercules; or the Rococo floral patterns painted on the ceilings and the staircases; taking from the art movements that came before him and making them his own.
Room to room, there are so many works and activities to connect with. I love taking my time in a museum (to my family’s groaning) and the exhibition provided interactive sections to appeal to every type of museumgoer (except maybe my family who would have claimed a bench for the next few hours by then).
For audiovisual learners, they had two video projections, more general in the first room then more specific to a body of Mucha’s work later on, with age-appropriate classical music. For fans of the Immersive Experiences that toured Claude Monet and Van Gogh around the world, another room was entirely covered in screens that surrounded you in his paintings that come to life. For perfume experts that know what a gourmand vs. a floral scent is, there were genuinely bottles of perfumes for each specific painting in his series personifying the arts. And yes, they smelt as incredible as that sounds!
I’ve never been to a museum that was so thoughtful with how to present an artist’s work, literally, out of the box. But don’t get me wrong, even though I loved the hallway decorated to look like a Paris street to transition to the works he made during his stay there or the board explaining the symbolism in Mucha’s flower choices with flashcard-style cutouts, it cannot triumph over the sheer beauty of Mucha’s paintings.
The delicate details for hair, the wrinkles of the clothes, elegant jewelry I want to reach through the canvas to wear; how the light shimmers on the gold as if it’s really moving across the painting. It is not anywhere near seeing it on my tiny computer screen or projected onto the grainy board in class.
I came to Rome knowing I would get to see older Roman artworks in-person too to this up-close and awestriking effect. But this city is overflowing with so many more artists and movements to explore and fall in love with, you may walk into them just by being here. And when museums like this go all out to invite you into the art in so many ways, it is as if stepping into an entirely new world we may belong to.
You can explore new worlds like this and more with Temple Rome’s classes that provide free tickets and insight on the history of the works and the space itself.