The exhibition then proceeds chronologically into the second half of the nineteenth century, in a brand-new direction for Italy, and the choice of paintings strives to pinpoint the vision that made the North a place that is not only geographical, but also spiritual. Munch is thus its logical and inevitable culmination. First, however, the candour, luminosity, silence and clangour of the Northern landscape offer an interpretation that sometimes veers towards a complexity that transforms natural locations into an arcane and almost primordial sentiment. This sense of underlying time, the lightness of summers, the depth of winter nights, the mossy velvet of the grass, the white flowers beneath the pale summer moon: this is what the exhibition aims to show the Italian public. This has been made possible by the generosity of the foremost museums and art galleries in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, whose large-scale loans have allowed the construction of an exhaustive pictorial panorama that has recently fascinated the large public of art lovers, with several exhibitions in both America and Europe. In this sense the exhibition catalogue, featuring contributions by the greatest scholars of these countries, is an essential tool.

The exhibition obviously also includes some of the leading artists, commencing with Ring Philipsen, Syberg, Gottschalk and, in particular, Hammershoi, in Denmark. An entire room is dedicated to Hammershoi, whose extraordinary life was revealed several years ago by a successful exhibition staged in Paris. The works include several landscapes, but above all the artist’s enchanting interior scenes. On display for the first time in Italy, Hammershoi’s works represent the culmination, at the turn of the twentieth century, of a path that arose from the ashen light of seventeenth-century Dutch interior scenes, but which was transformed by infinite nuances of grey, sometimes shading into pale blue. This palette confers the sense of solitude of these figures, which never move within the spaces, but are suspended, as though time could stand still for ever.

The other artists featured in the exhibition are Nielsen, Backer, Thaulow, Krohg and Skredsvig in Norway; Larrsson, Nordström, Zorn, Jansson, Prince Eugen and Strindberg in Sweden; and Edelfelt, Gallen-Kallela, Järnefelt, Churberg, Halonen and Thesleff in Finland. All of their works share pictorial characteristics that place man at the centre of image in the huge and practically immeasurable space of unspoilt nature, juxtaposing the Romantic sentiment with a certain Symbolist mood, as is well exemplified by the work of the great Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

The final part of the exhibition dedicated to Munch, which also comprises about ten drawings that provide the necessary contrast to the artist’s pictorial work, reaches its apex in the careful choice of paintings that allows the viewers to understand the relationship between the Scandinavian painters and the Norwegian master. Taken together, they form the great chorus of nature and its complexities that finally reveal the exhibition’s true and complete meaning, and make Scandinavia a land that is simultaneously radiant and nocturnal: the quintessence of both light and night.