The naturalistic, landscape, portraiture or specifically myth-symbolic and hieratic representation has undergone evolutions of all kinds over the millennia. Representation of what belongs to the myth or ritual or even to the imagination can be celebratory, ornamental, intimate or purely formal and detached from the emotion of the author. In this collection we have privileged themes with a strong ontological connection to comply with the main purpose of the Foundation, namely the knowledge and learning of symbolism, myth and ritual. With some exceptions, the subjects always refer to the reasons for man's search for his identity, towards knowledge of self and of his surroundings, often availing of contemporary philosophical codes and styles.

The boundary between poetry, philosophy, science and religiosity is often impalpable in a classic work and becomes very vague as individualism prevails over adherence to a logical frame. Therefore, in this collection we will find many 19th century art-works, ceramics and some small sculptures, each with its own reason. With regards in particular to paintings from recent centuries, many English painters, with greater or lesser technical competence, have often visited Italy, and represented those emotions described by all the great foreign travelers in their famous diaries of travel in our country.

The egoic and emotional element often makes its way into the representations, the storm and anguish of those who are far away. Often these are sketches for book illustrations, but sometimes the painter “penetrates” nature trying to represent the sense of an atmospheric event. In fact, nineteenth-century paintings are often entitled with the names of emotional or sentimental experiences (from pre-impressionism onwards). Safe exceptions, in the nineteenth-century the element of pompous memory of history or of a religious or warrior event, present in the great works of previous centuries commissioned by popes and emperors, fades: the emphasis of the celebration ends because man feels the desperate need to rediscover the its origins, which cannot be confined to a formal representation, and begins to tell about itself. In all the collected works, however, the memory of the classical world is always present, a connection with the “principal” symbol dispersed by the pressing modernity.