Galleria
d'arte Dipinti e sculture '800 e '900

Diego Valeri’s words encapsulate the ethos of Recta Gallery

A love and passion predominantly for nineteenth and twentieth century paintings and sculptures, led Valter Benedetti to open Recta Gallery at 140 Via die Coronari in Rome in 2010, with the purpose of offering a dynamic and continually renewing display of paintings and sculptures from Italian and international artists of this period.

The gallery gives great attention to paintings composed in Rome and the surrounding region of Lazio during the 19th century, with particular emphasis on the community of international artists who visited the entire region (from Olevano to Anticoli Corrado and Cervara) during the period of the Grand Tour. This includes the Danish artists Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Peter Christian Thamsen Skovgaard and Bertel Thorvaldsen and the group of well-known German landscape artists such as Jacob Philipp Hackert and Jonathan Christian Reinhart, and French painters who had been awarded the Prix de Rome.

The great enthusiasm for Rome and the surrounding region also led to the formation of regional and local communities of artists, who have produced fascinating artwork. The most well-known among these group of artists are The Gruppo degli acquarellisti romani (Group of Roman Watercolourists), the society In Arte Libertas, and XXV della Campagna Romana (The 25 of the Roman Countryside).

Recta Gallery also focuses on other Italian regional schools and communities of artists such as:

• 19th century Lombardy and their Scapigliati;
• 19th century Naples with the School of Posillipo and the School of Resina;
• 19th century Piedmont and Veneto;
• 19th century Liguria and the Grigia School;
• 19th century Tuscany with the Macchiaioli and the post-Macchiaioli;
• 20th century Tuscany with the Labronico Group and the Painters for Modern Realism.

Continuing with the period of the twentieth century, Recta Gallery is fascinated by avant-gardism and the currents and movements characterising the evolution of European painting and sculpture: Impressionism, Expressionism and Abstractionism, with Symbolists and Fauvists, but also Divisionism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Decadentism, Futurism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Metaphysics, Magic Realism, Hyperrealism, Pop Art and Surrealism.

Where does the name ‘Recta’ come from? 

‘Recta’ is a tribute to the streets in which the gallery was born. Towards the end of the 1400s, the Via Recta formed a thoroughfare through to St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, passing through the maze of alleyways in the medieval city. The road was built during the medieval reconstruction of the city, commissioned by Pope Sisto IV on the occasion of the Jubilee in 1475. The street allowed pilgrims to comfortably cross the Campo Marzio and reach the Vatican and it therefore became their preferred highway. This meant that in the Via Recta, a flourishing trade of rosary beads, sacred images and particularly crowns grew up, from which the current name Via dei Coronari derives. History has run its course and after time Via dei Coronari has become the premier site for antiques dealers, transforming it into one of the most interesting streets in Rome, both from a historical and architectural point of view.