The third section of this exhibition—dedicated to the overall meaning of borders in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—is devoted to figures placed within space, that vast realm of time and life which so often borders on the infinite.

For this reason, the reference to American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is particularly significant here, where the resounding and infinite dimension of nature becomes a necessity. Yet, at a certain point in this section, the path returns to Europe.
This area of the exhibition touches one of the key turning points in the very notion of the border: figures—whether consciously or unconsciously—who are always in dialogue with the infinity of space, which ultimately turns back and reflects within them.

The almost heroic relationship between humankind and nature—following in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the two greatest voices of the nineteenth century—is a defining and deeply compelling feature of the so-called Hudson River School. This group of painters gave birth to modern American art, moving beyond the allure of eighteenth-century English painting that had long served as its reference point.
The Hudson River Valley is the unspoiled place that marks borders like those of an earthly paradise, and Asher Brown Durand, in the first room of this section, reveals it with great clarity. Yet within this same room, the focus lies above all on the relationship between the figures and the ocean, where the border stretches into vastness. Extraordinary painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and John Frederick Kensett are represented here with their works, embodying this vision.

The second room of the section—one generation later—celebrates the triumph of placing figures within a space that expands its borders beyond all measure.
It begins with that extraordinary artist who serves as a bridge in America between one century and the next, his very name filled with wind: Winslow Homer.
His studio, along the coast of Maine, was a kind of sanctuary facing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which he depicted in so many of his canvases.
He is represented in the exhibition by one of his masterpieces, The West Wind, painted just a few years before the end of the nineteenth century—an extraordinary image, and, like many other works on display, shown in Italy for the very first time.

The room also includes works by three artists who, in twentieth-century America, each in his own way, carried forward that heroic projection of figures into the boundless space of nature—though at times doing so not directly within the landscape, but from the threshold of a doorway or the edge of a terrace.
In this sense, the works of Edward Hopper and Richard Diebenkorn are enchanting—two artists who made American painting a true treasure chest of wonders.
And the relationship between figures and space, within the dimension of the border that transforms from the everyday into the eternal, is the defining trait of Andrew Wyeth’s work, a painter of incomparable, intricate, and dreamlike modulations.

This part of the exhibition, in the third and final room of the section, features several European painters who cultivated that profound relationship between figures and nature.
Among them is Giovanni Segantini, with his peasant women among the mountains, watching over a place where borders dissolve.
But before him stands Arnold Böcklin, with a truly post-Romantic masterpiece in which a pensive, melancholic figure is placed at the edge of a sea turning to undertow.
And finally, Henri Matisse, whose painting presents the sign of a window as the necessary point of passage toward distant borders.