Surrealist master Rene' Magritte's lifelong dalliance with nature is spotlighted in a major new exhibition in Milan.
The show, opening in Palazzo Reale on November 22, will encompass around 100 paintings featuring Magritte's signature apples, blue skies and birds.
Drawing liberally on the extensive collection stored in Belgium's Musees Royaux des Beaux Arts, the exhibition will host a string of Magritte's best-known works from the 1950s onwards.
Le Tombeau des Lutteurs (1960) shows a bizarrely oversized rose, the bloom just squeezing into an otherwise empty room, while his 1961 Souvenir de Voyage is one of a series of works depicting a masked apple.
L'Heureux Donateur from 1966 shows the transparent outline of a bowler-hatted man through which can be seen a nocturnal country landscape and an illuminated building.
Le Bouquet Tout Fait (1956) shows the back of the bowler-hatted man overlooking a golden autumnal wood. The flower-bedecked figure of Flora, from Sandro Botticelli's masterpiece Primavera, overlays the man's back.
L'Empire des Lumieres is considered one of Magritte's greatest achievements by many art historians. Produced in 1961, it depicts a realistic daytime sky overlooking a tree-surrounded house at night.
The odd contrast between day and night is typical of Magritte's preference for realistic objects in odd settings, unlike other surrealist artists, who twisted the objects themselves.
In addition to his famous paintings, the exhibition will also explore the role of nature in Magritte's lesser-known earliest pieces, when he toyed with futurist ideas, as well as forgotten works from the inter-war period.
La Clef des Champs (1936) at first glance appears to show a shattered window looking out over trees but the shards of glass falling from the window contain reflections of the trees.
''Nature is omnipresent in Magritte's artistic voyage,'' commented the show's curator Michel Draguet.
''On the one hand it provides a myriad of themes, which the artist explores and combines at will, while on the other it is a framework for everything, a container that shapes every form of understanding''.
The exhibition, which runs until March 29, is one of Italy's largest ever Magritte events.
