The Balzan collection is the collection of paintings that belonged to Eugenio Balzan, made up of paintings from the main Italian schools and movements existing in the years straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes some absolute pinnacles of Italian painting of the time.
The collection consists of 49 works created by 26 Italian painters and encompasses some absolute peaks of painting from the time, such as the works of Domenico Morelli, including the masterpiece "The Pompeian Bath," or the canvases by Mosè Bianchi and the paintings by Filippo Palizzi, including the extraordinary "Girl on the Rock at Sorrento." It features examples of excellence for each of the artists Balzan chose to collect: we also recall the Piedmontese Alberto Pasini, the Lombards Leonardo Bazzaro, Eugenio Gignous, and Gaetano Previati, the Venetians Giacomo Favretto, Luigi Nono, and Ettore Tito, the Tuscans Giovanni Fattori and Plinio Nomellini, the Neapolitans Edoardo Dalbono, Giuseppe De Nittis, Francesco Paolo Michetti, Federico Rossano, and Gioacchino Toma, in a perfectly successful effort to represent each regional "School," as Italian artistic history of the Nineteenth century was then understood, including an incursion into the Twentieth century with a work by Ardengo Soffici.
