Loading...
Ettore De Maria Bergler’s Pictorial Cycle in the Villa Igiea: The Unfolding of Sicily’s International Identity through Stile Floreale
Ricci, Maddalena Eloisa
Ricci, Maddalena Eloisa
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, many European nations developed artistic styles specific of their fin-de-siècle nation-building context that were nonetheless internationalist and broadly pan-European. Italy defined its own in the Stile Floreale, where a national effort to communicate in an international language was made. The Sala degli Specchi stands as a case study for this: in Sicily, the painter Ettore De Maria Bergler expressed the complex relations of regionalism, nationalism and internationalism, in his program for the painted cycle of the Sala degli Specchi in the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea, Palermo, which he completed between 1899 and 1900. Although the various declensions of Stile Floreale–namely, Art Nouveau–have received substantial attention in international scholarship, Italian research remains uneven, particularly regarding its regional inflections and its capacity to articulate broader ideological concerns in the decades following political unification. The Villa Igiea decorations have largely been approached through the figure of the architect Ernesto Basile or through celebratory narratives of Bergler’s artistic “genius,” leaving underexplored the cultural ambitions of the Florio family, their industrial bourgeois taste that ultimately shaped the commission, and the circulation of European decorative language. This thesis, therefore, aims to broaden the understanding of Stile Floreale within the regional landscape of Sicily, the national fin-de-siècle Italian environment, and its international nature. A socio-political framework situates the cycle within post-Unification Italy, drawing on the questione meridionale to examine tensions between northern and southern Italy and to assess how Sicily’s cultural position informed the commission. This is complemented by iconographical analysis to elucidate how Bergler synthesised local motifs with European language of Art Nouveau. This integrated approach reveals a new iii interpretative model for understanding the Stile Floreale and provides a foundation for future comparative studies of regional modernisms within transnational turn of the century environments.
Description
Thesis (B.A. in Art History, Minor in Marketing)--John Cabot University, Fall 2025.
Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Collections
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Ettore De Maria Bergler, Flowers in art, Women in art
Citation
Ricci, Maddalena Eloisa. "Ettore De Maria Bergler’s Pictorial Cycle in the Villa Igiea: The Unfolding of Sicily’s International Identity through Stile Floreale". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2025.