Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museum of 18th-century Venice
From 7 March to 8 June 2026

Curated by Alberto Craievich

One of the most renowned groups in the Gulbenkian Museum’s collections is the splendid set of paintings by Francesco Guardi (1712-1793), the last great Venetian painter of views in the 18th century, acquired in the first twenty years of the 20th century. They include some of the most sublime works by the artist, who is famous for having begun painting views in middle age, after years spent experimenting with history and genre painting.

All dating from between 1770 and 1790, Guardi’s works in the Gulbenkian are outstanding examples of his style, with allusive brushstrokes and freely distorted proportions, creating views in which the structure of perspective appears elastic. Now far removed from Canaletto’s geometric certainties and camera obscura, Venice as portrayed by Francesco Guardi is made up of buildings eroded by light, rendered through tremulous brushwork, as if offering an inward image of Venice and its civilisation already in rapid decline. The subjects are those that the artist explored at various times, such as The Feast of the Ascension in St. Mark’s Square, the Regattas on the Grand Canal and the Departure of the Bucintoro.

Thanks to collaboration between the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, visitors will be able to admire a selection of these paintings by Francesco Guardi in the Portego of Ca’ Rezzonico, together with a set of drawings from the collection of the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints. The dialogue between painting and graphic art will offer insights into the creative achievement of one of the iconic artists of 18th-century Venice.

Opened in 1969, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum is one of the most important cultural institutions in Lisbon. The original core of its collections consists of the immense collection of the Armenian entrepreneur and philanthropist, naturalised a British citizen, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955), known for his refined tastes and extensive interests.
The works he acquired over the years bear exceptional witness to his deep passion for art, which ranged from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, the European 17th century and the Impressionists, as well as decorative art objects.

The exhibition can be visited according to the museum’s opening hours and admission procedures.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From 26 September 2025 to 23 February 2026
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano 

Curated by Alberto Craievich

The Prints and Drawings Cabinet of Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia preserves an extraordinary record of neoclassical art and culture in Italy. This is the Album Cicognara, named after its owner, Count Leopoldo Cicognara (Ferrara, 1767 – Venice, 1834), one of the most fascinating figures of his time. After devoting his youth to studying the humanities and formative travels through the peninsula, he immediately joined Napoleon’s Cisalpine Republic, in which he was a member of the legislative body. In 1808 he became president of the Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice, a position he held even after the fall of Napoleon, until 1826.

Cultivated and brilliant, particularly active in cultural policies in Venice and elsewhere, while he was the president of the Accademia he published his principal works, including a monumental Storia della scultura and Le fabbriche più cospicue di Venezia. He was responsible for outstanding initiatives, such as the arrangement of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, which was being developed at that time with the arrival of paintings from places of worship suppressed by Napoleonic decree. He was the moving spirit behind the “Homage of the Venetian Provinces to Austria”, by which the ten thousand sequins owed by the Veneto as a gift for the emperor’s marriage were converted into artworks produced by Venetian artists. He also organised the subscription to erect a monument in the church of the Frari on the death of Antonio Canova, and wrote an important biography of the great sculptor.

The album testifies to his close friendship with the artists of his time, being a sort of liber amicorum of 81 sheets. It contains all the great names of Italian Neoclassicism: Vincenzo Camuccini, Andrea Appiani, Giuseppe Bossi and the young Francesco Hayez, as well as French artists such as François-Marius Granet, Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé and Louis Léopold Robert. Six drawings are by his lifelong friend Antonio Canova, whom Cicognara passionately admired.

The drawings were originally bound in an album kept in a sumptuous case decorated with bronze friezes framing cameos in the ancient style, with at the centre a delightful miniature with a View of Venice. The drawings document the whole range of graphic techniques and every possible subject. There are drawings in pencil, pen, coloured chalks and watercolours depicting views, portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, animals, sacred and profane compositions.
We find preparatory studies for major works, and finished drawings made expressly for Cicognara. Overall, a unique work, considering both the collector’s political and cultural role and the number of artists present, an expression of all the artistic schools of the period.

This precious volume, communicated to scholars by Álvar González-Palacios in 1970, was presented to the general public in 1978 in the exhibition Venezia nell’età di Canova. On that occasion, for better conservation, the pages of the album were unbound and placed within passe-partouts. Some sheets, the most famous, had been displayed in the meanwhile at exhibitions devoted to Neoclassicism in Italy and abroad.

Now, almost fifty years later, the album has been carefully restored by the Venice International Foundation and is again presented for the first time complete.

Admission to the exhibition from 28 September, 2025 to 23 February, 2026 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From 10 October 2024 to 20 January 2025 *Exhibition extended to 3 February, 2025
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Alberto Craievich

In autumn 2024, Ca’ Rezzonico will be celebrating the addition of the ambassador Paolo Galli donation to the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. It comprises 216 sheets of Italian masters from the 16th to the 20th century. By the quality of the specimens, variety of techniques and types, number of artists documented (from the rarest petits-maîtres to the most famous names), it is the most important acquisition of graphic works since the Nuccia and Riccardo Musatti bequest in 1967.
The result of a private passion, cultivated over the years with the help of great scholars in the field such as Philip Pouncey, Terisio Pignatti and Mario Di Giampaolo, Galli built up the collection through acquisitions at the principal auctions and from specialist dealers, without a precise plan, following his personal taste and fascination with a secret world embodying each artist’s creative moments.

In addition to the classic names of the Venetian masters of the 18th century, such as Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, Giambattista Piazzetta, Antonio and Francesco Guardi, Gaspare Diziani, Francesco Fontebasso, the collection above all includes Italian painters of other schools, in particular those of Bologna, Rome and Florence. This is particularly significant for the Foundation’s Drawings and Prints Department, enabling it to expand its collections beyond Venice in a broad and detailed way. In fact, although it is rightly numbered among the most important in the peninsula, its holdings, with splendid exceptions, are by its nature and formation purely Venetian.

This is the first time that Agostino Carracci, Bertoja, Cavalier d’Arpino, Giovanni Baglione, Figino, Giorgio Vasari, Francesco Vanni and many others have entered our collections.
And not only old masters: it includes Italian 20th-century works by Cadorin, Cagli, Mafai, Severini, Sironi and Vedova, documenting as far as possible the history of Italian graphics. There are also some anonymous drawings, attributable to regional schools, which still reveal points of interest: particularly felicitous execution, an unusual technique or a debate over attribution among the experts.

What is most surprising, when examining the collection in its entirety, is the variety of the works, the different types of sheets in which the human figure predominates: studies of anatomy or drapery, crowded compositions, portraits and caricatures. It is also a colourful collection, as if to dispel the most traditional clichés about graphic works. Even the least attentive observer will be surprised by the prepared papers and the variety of techniques: pencil, chalk, ink of all shades and watercolours.
Some of the drawings have been presented in exhibitions or publications and volumes devoted to graphics, while others have been available for private viewing for years. All have been photographed for the occasion, and will be the subject of a catalogue specifically devoted to the collection.

Admission to the exhibition from 10 October 2024 to 3 February 2025 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Atrium
From 19 April to 15 September 2024

Artistic Director Alberto Toso Fei
Curated by Chiara Squarcina

Anime di Venezia – Souls of Venice is the new creation of Italian-American artist Lorenzo Quinn, which will be on display in Venice until 15 September 2024, commemorating the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death.

Comprised of 15 statues made of a metallic mesh weave of thousands of links, the installation presents some of the most significant ‘Souls’ that have lived over the centuries of the Venetian Republic, traditionally known as La Serenissima, sealing the union and symbiosis between the city and all its artistic expressions that have seen these Venetians as the protagonists that have helped make the city immortal.

The fascinating installation is located in the Atrium of Ca’ Rezzonico, the splendid and imposing building overlooking the Grand Canal and designed by Baldassare Longhena, home to the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice. It is a refreshing and iconic project that indelibly marks the bond of love between Venice and Lorenzo Quinn.

Anime di Venezia – Souls of Venice is indeed an absolute novelty in Quinn’s production: for the first time, a work with a historical background, designed specifically for the museum, “comes to life” thanks to the introduction of a contemporary tool: augmented reality, expressed through a poetic and magical vision.

Free admission
_

IMAGE GALLERY: Photo Speranzoni Wladimiro

Biography of the artist >>>

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From 21 September 2024 to 31 March 2025
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei
In collaboration with Galleria Continua and VeniceArtFactory

The exhibition project at Ca’ Rezzonico presents ten new works by Loris Cecchini, whose artistic practice has centred on modularity for over 15 years. Using the various languages of architecture, design and engineering to explore the interstices and morphological processes defined by leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams – hence the title of the project – Cecchini articulates a dialogue with the collections and architecture of the Museum’s three floors.

The starting point is the monumental climbing installations, protagonists of an intense interaction with the architecture of the exterior portego. Waterbones and Arborexence, proliferating in space from individual steel and aluminium units, molecular or vegetal structures that branch out, enveloping the architectural elements and becoming one with them.

On the first floor, in the Ballroom, the experience is one of vertigo: the dialogue unfolds between the large structures Otherworldly Winds, red narrative and black narrative (aeolian landforms on zigzag particles), works in moulded resin with rippling nylon velvet – evoking vibrant desert landscapes; the works of the Zigzags particles series, sculptural interventions of a granular nature, created with aluminium castings; the sumptuous and exuberant Baroque furniture made of ebony and boxwood by Andrea Brustolon; the extraordinary frescoes by Giambattista Crosato and Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna. Thanks to their illusive abilities, 18th-century painting and sculpture, together with Cecchini’s works, transport the visitor into a magical and surreal dimension.

Finally, on the second floor, between the rooms with Giandomenico Tiepolo’s frescoes and the portego with Canaletto’s views, there are some modular sculptural interventions, the wall work Wallwave vibration (Chorus Transition Probabilities), in which the artist imagines a sudden variation, a sonorous vibration, that provocatively dissolves the architectural surface, and a large telescope from the Zigzags particles series, facing the famous ‘tear’ of the fresco in Villa Tiepolo in Zianigo: Il mondo novo.

This last room, which concludes the exhibition, encapsulates Cecchini’s artistic discourse: the work as a tool for proposing a change of perspective and a reversal of the very concept of representation. In Il mondo novo (1791), Giandomenico Tiepolo depicts a crowd scene around the magic lantern house, an invention through which the audience represented here could imagine turning their gaze towards the exotic, towards the future, giving space to fantasy. Cecchini’s Telescope I, facing this emblematic fresco, reinforces the idea of the work of art as a device for breaking through reality.

A reference to ‘breaking through’ that, in the curators’ idea, also determines a further level of interaction and correspondence. When admiring the masterful frescoed ceilings by Tiepolo, Guarana, Crosato and Diziani, the theme of the cloud recurs, central to the opening up of spaces through painted skies, and it is here that we find the point of contact between the painters of the 18th century and the artist of today: the cloud as an intermediate unit, a transition between the real and the virtual, a formal element that corresponds to the idea of a modular sculpture that spreads organically and freely, adapting to the space itself and to the place.

Admission to the exhibition from 21 September 2024, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.
_

IMAGE GALLERY: photo OKNOstudio

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From 8 March to 3 June, 2024
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Giovanni Maria Fara and David Landau
With the support of Save Venice
In conjunction with Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa

During the Renaissance, Venice established itself as the leading Italian centre for the production and distribution of prints through its position as an international emporium open to the major trade routes. As the fulcrum of a veritable revolution in images, the city was the market for some of the 16th century’s most important and fascinating graphic works and publications.

The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, in conjunction with the Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa, is devoting a major project to this unique artistic season, retracing the supreme achievements of graphic art in the Serenissima, fully comparable with painting, as if one were the mirror of the other.

The core of the project is the collections of the two institutions, partly restored thanks to support from Save Venice. Ensuring a complete overview of this extraordinary artistic phenomenon, they are supplemented with works from private and public collections: the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice, Scuola Grande di San Marco, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, as well as the Biblioteca Queriniana of Brescia, Biblioteca Palatina of Parma, and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Gallerie degli Uffizi.

The project, which will run concurrently in the two venues and be accompanied by a single catalogue, is divided into chronological and thematic sections: innovations in the late 15th century; large formats; Venetian and foreign printmakers in the first and second decades of the 16th century; the creation of chiaroscuro; “By Titian […] many landscapes”; men of letters and printers in the mid-16th century; “through prints, the manners of Italy” in Venice; “Titianus inventor”: the workshop and graphics from maturity to the master’s late period; Agostino Carracci, engraver after Veronese and Tintoretto; Giuseppe Scolari “excellent designer and engraver”.

These are accompanied by some further insights, especially devised for specific sections of the exhibition present only in Venice or Bassano, to mark the originality of the itineraries and the extraordinary richness of the individual collections. The themes addressed are of exceptional significance and present some of the greatest artists of the time: Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Jacopo de’ Barbari, Titian and the workshops of his innumerable engravers, Tintoretto, Veronese, Benedetto Montagna, Ugo da Carpi, Domenico Campagnola, Agostino Carracci and Giuseppe Scolari. 

A layout with a great visual impact comprising over a hundred works for each venue, in which the “felicitous black lines” of engravings, so highly praised by the humanists (as Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote, who coined this expression in comparing Dürer’s many-sided graphic output with the renowned but lost paintings of Apelles) are measured against the foundational themes, universally recognized, of Venetian art: tonal chiaroscuro, landscape, canvases, narrative painting, the female nude, the dialectical relationship with different artistic traditions, a personal idea of antiquity and the defence of its own irreducible identity.

Through prints – multipliable and easily transportable, without geographical or linguistic boundaries – Venice revealed what it most intimately meant for the artistic tradition of Europe: an essential crossroads of experiences in continuous and tumultuous innovation.

Admission to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From 13 October 2023 to 09 January 2024 *Exhibition extended to 14 February 2024
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Alberto Craievich

The fame of Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), the most celebrated female Italian artist in 18th-century Europe, knew no bounds. Everyone from English lords to princes of the Empire agreed on the excellence of her portraits. She was perhaps the only artist to find unanimous approval among the most sophisticated connoisseurs of international high society and the traditional, conservative Venetian aristocracy. For almost half a century, the courts of Europe sought her services. Yet despite frequent invitations and generous
proposals, aside from three visits: to the court of the King of France, to the Duke of Modena, and to the Emperor’s court in Vienna, she preferred to remain in Venice, where she worked ceaselessly throughout her life.

She is credited with the most discerning portrayals of the personalities of 18thcentury Venetian and European society. She was an incomparable interpreter of the ideals of grace and elegance of an entire era, a social milieu that has now entered the collective imagination as our idea of the ancien régime.

In addition to devoting herself to pastel portraiture, Rosalba Carriera was an outstanding painter of miniatures on ivory; in fact she pioneered this genre, elevating it from a craft to a true art. Using an innovative technique, she succeeded for the first time in bringing the fluid, vibrant brushstrokes of painting on canvas to tiny ivory supports. Her success was immediate. There was no visitor to Venice who did not aspire to have a miniature portrait made by Rosalba. Today, however, these small images are rare, in fact their number is much smaller than her pastel work.

It is to Rosalba Carriera the miniaturist that this retrospective is dedicated, with thirtysix works on display, together with the pastels from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and from private collections. The exhibition offers a very rare opportunity to admire these works of extraordinarily delicate refinement, now classic examples of Rococo art, in the year that marks the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s birth.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Ca’ Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano
14 July- 25 September 2023

Curated by
Fondazione Lino Tagliapietra
Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

“Probably no two words are more respected and honored in the history of modern glass sculpture than “Lino Tagliapietra”. He embodies the living bridge, the crucial conjunction between the august history of Venetian glass and the continuous wonders of what we call today the modern movement of Studio Glass”
— James Yood, The Hands of the Maestro

Curated by Fondazione Lino Tagliapietra together with Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Lino Tagliapietra. The Origins of a Journey wants to pay homage to an artist, traveler, experimenter, during his constant search for stimuli he can transfer to his works, including passionate research, technical perfection, and sublimation of the beauty of glass.

Today this journey of creativity, color and craftsmanship has found a new temporary home in the renovated rooms of the Ca’ Rezzonico Museum in Venice. Mounted in an itinerary designed by the architect Chiara Lamonarca on the first and second floors of the palazzo, the 21 works on display offer a cross section of the Maestro’s vast production over the last thirty years in an open dialogue with the eighteenth-century masterpieces around them. Alongside iconic works such as the long-necked Dinosaur, Fuji, Asola, Niomea, Oca, Africa, and Hopi offer a description of traditional Murano techniques such as blown glass with canes, filigree, murrines, incalmo, double blowing or other typical processes of the second processing such as beating and grinding. It is with these sculptural works that Lino Tagliapietra established himself as an independent artist, heralding new seasons and generations of glass artists.

Also on display is a careful selection of panels in fused glass created between 1999 and 2012, made by superimposing different techniques and colors. The initial evocations — already declared in the titles Finestra sul campiello, Ponticello, Rio Grande – not only represent doors leading to places close to the Maestro’s heart, but also express passions, such as Rothko’s painting. In this case the works are pictorial rather than sculptural, in contrast to the practice of an artist who has hardly ever made preparatory drawings.
Made of glass frit with solid glass inserts or with the use of canes and zanfirico murrine, the panels are undoubtedly among Lino Tagliapietra’s most experimental and demanding works, and it is in these that his relentless, exotic, experimental and creative drive emerges.
The panel Giuditta closes the exhibition on the second floor. Like a glass altarpiece installed between two altarpieces, the work stands out for its bright colors and the stylized profile that characterizes its subject. A prayer and thanksgiving for a life spent in the color and art of glass.

Image gallery: photo Roberta Orio

–

Born in Venice in 1934, Lino Tagliapietra has been working with glass since he became an apprentice when he was just eleven. From a young age his unique talent made him stand out in Murano, earning the title of maestro when he was only twenty-one years old for his expertise in the art of blown glass. His prolific talent on the island of glass in the Venetian lagoon, together with his insatiable curiosity, soon led him to travel extensively, so much so that in 1979 he made a trip to America and visited Seattle for the first time. It was here that he introduced the Pilchuck School students to the traditions of Venetian glassblowing, thus cementing his name in the history of the American glassblowing tradition. Through his teachings, Tagliapietra has irrevocably changed the use of glass in the United States, setting a new future for this medium, infused with the knowledge and skill of the Italian tradition interpreted through a new vibrant energy.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Open day
Tuesday 27 June 2023, h 10.00 – 18.00
Free admission, reservation required

Ca’ Rezzonico – Museum of 18th Century Venice reopens its doors after major renovation, restoration and refurbishment works.
For the first time, more than twenty years after the opening of the Museum, the need has arisen to renovate the palace, yet without affecting its magical atmosphere as a period museum.
To further improve the quality of the services offered and guarantee the museum’s greater functionality, the ground floor facilities and reception areas will be refurbished after being severely damaged during the high water incident of November 2019.

With this in mind, new state-of-the-art educational areas are planned, as well as the renewal of the toilets, ticket office and bookshop.
Ground floor renovation have been carried out thanks to a major donation of 450,000 euro from Coop Italia, provided through the ArtBonus system.
The Municipal Administration and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia have decided to add to this generous funding by also intervening on the upper floors. Taking advantage of the period of closure, a new lighting system will be installed and large-scale maintenance undertaken on the Venetian-style terrazzo floor and some parts of the garden. All halogen lighting fixtures will be replaced with new LED lights on the first and third floor exhibition rooms, which will also enhance the enjoyment the works on display.

When the museum reopens, works from the collection that have been in storage for decades will return to public display, along with works recently donated by private individuals. Lastly, work continues on the restoration of the collections in the Foundation’s Cabinet of Drawings and Prints, housed since 2021 on the mezzanine floor of Ca’ Rezzonico.

_

From Wednesday 28 June 2023 the Museum will reopen, check opening hours and tickets

On Tuesday 27 June 2023, h 10.00 – 18.00
Free admission opening day, reservation required

Reservations to take part in the opening day are currently closed.

The downloaded ticket must be shown at the entrance of the Museum at the chosen time.

L'articolo Reopening Ca’ Rezzonico – Museum of 18th Century Venice sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

FLAVIO FAVELLI. Inverse beauty

9 May – 15 September 2019
Venezia, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Gabriella Belli

Ca’ Rezzonico is taking part in the MUVE Contemporaneo project by hosting Flavio Favelli’s site-specific exhibition that traverses the museum’s monumental rooms.

Fifteen new works form the basis of the exhibition of Flavio Favelli at Ca’ Rezzonico. Inverse beauty, “that is reversed, opposite”, explains the artist, tells of “a beauty imagined that is my imagination, something that is not easy to display in a place and in a city that is the Art par excellence”.

“Venice has always been a stage in my life; as a child I used to go there because, as my mother said, “you have to know Italy”. It is difficult to exhibit in such distinctive places: one always seeks out a dialogue, and there is the hope that the artist of today, who by his nature is considered “lightweight” compared to the art of the past, pays homage to our Art & History seen as a kind of ideal to which to aspire”.

The wooden platforms that for months have been trampled on by passers-by who crossed the Accademia bridge, covered for a restoration that was completed at the end of last year, bearing the signs of trampling feet and work paints. A red star recalling an advertisement, light-boxes with logos and names (Generali, Lacoste, Coca-Cola) and the brands erased by paint, the reinterpretation of an old label of the famous Venetian aperitif Select that becomes a banner. Iron lattices in the form of a trellis, mimetic motifs of warships, scratched mirrors, reconstructed furniture and silver-plated trays. The common denominator of these works is the overlapping of images, textures and materials. The form is the assembly, the combination of forms and objects and meanings, the composition, the collage and finally the painting. The central theme is that of the altered and sophisticated sign-text-logo for a different image that shifts and adulterates the original meaning and leads to a new formal and conceptual complexity.

The artist also makes use of buildings, pylons, furniture and tin panels, signs, “abstract” statues and light-boxes. As the artist notes, in the Museo del Settecento Veneziano “there are no walls to pierce”: the intervention is therefore site-specific in the most practical sense, with three-dimensional works.

Flavio Favelli does not only look at the history of art. In his work we may also find the history of costume, everyday objects, tools of communication, and of advertising “which in Italy has influenced our history more than we think”, and there is the biography of the artist himself, for those materials and those imaginary have settled in his personal story too.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Anton Maria Zanetti (1679-1767) was a central figure in the eighteenth-century history of Venetian collecting and in the world’s endorsement of Venetian art. An art patron and influential intermediary on behalf of nobles and sovereigns, commissioning and purchasing works by Venice’s most famous artists, Zanetti was perhaps the most influential character in the Venetian art scene of the time. Known as “il Vecchio”, or “di Girolamo”, to distinguish him from his namesake younger cousin who was a famous librarian at the Marciana Library in Venice, Zanetti was not only a passionate collector but also a talented draughtsman and skilled engraver. After his father’s death in 1711, he was forced to provide for the rest of the family as an insurance agent, but despite difficulties, this did not prevent him from following his own inclinations.

A friend to artists such as Canaletto, Rosalba Carriera, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo, Zanetti was in close contact with the most important European collectors. 

He himself assembled an extraordinary collection of antique gems, drawings and prints that was dispersed after his death. He also promoted splendid publishing initiatives, most notably two volumes  on ancient sculpture, now conserved in the vestibule of the Marciana Library and one of the most beautiful and luxurious illustrated publications of the entire eighteenth century.

An inexhaustible collection of letters, now spread among libraries and private collectors, documents his dense network of relationships and friendships and offers a rare insight into the cultural life of the period. To commemorate this extraordinary figure, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia is dedicating him an exhibition that highlights his activities as an artist and patron. Testimonies from his life in the form of books, letters, engravings and drawings, none of which are usually exhibited for conservation reasons, will be shown together with art from his collection, including works by Tiepolo, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Palma il Giovane and others, now preserved in the city’s museums, among these the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, the Giorgio Cini Foundation, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and Venice’s civic museums, as well as in several private collections.

Curated by Alberto Craievich

L'articolo The Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, Venice was not only home to artist Rosalba Carriera, but also to another prominent painter, unfortunately completely ignored outside her homeland: Giulia Lama, whose father Agostino was also a painter, as well as an art dealer and art expert. Unlike her female artist contemporaries who were engaged in producing “feminine” genres such as portraiture or miniatures, Giulia focused on historical painting, creating large, densely filled compositions.

Far from the purely decorative or warmly sensual, Giulia Lama’s art is characterised by images of a powerful three-dimensional quality and expressive force, violent in its brushstrokes and use of colour, and close in character to Giambattista Piazzetta’s work in Venice in the same period.

Indeed Piazzetta has left us with an extraordinary portrait of Giulia Lama, who seems not to have been beautiful, but to have had a strong if melancholy temperament. The Correr Museum Cabinet of Drawings and Prints contains a splendid selection of Lama’s graphic works, all of them nude life drawings: certainly an unconventional practice for a woman of that time, yet one which fully reveals to us her independent, nonconformist personality.

A number of these works have been restored for this occasion and are on show for the first time.

Curated by Alberto Craievich

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

_

Curated by Beatrice Merz, artist Marzia Migliora’s exhibition features her recurrent expressive modes conveyed through a wide range of media, including photography, video, sound, performance, installation and drawing. Her work originates from a particular interest in the daily life of the individual, such as minor occurrences, topical events and personal memories. The result is a composite work that offers the public a shared experience of strong emotional and intellectual participation.

For this multifaceted project, Marzia Migliora once again takes her cue from the show’s venue. Attracted by the many connotations Venice evokes, from its complex history to its current contradictions, Migliora links Venetian affairs to those of the working world, with all its many legendary, literary and social implications.

The result is a sitespecific project that also dialogues with several of the works from the collection housed in Ca’ Rezzonico’s historic museum building, such as the Mondo nuovo (New World) fresco by Giandomenico Tiepolo and the painting Il Rinoceronte (The Rhinoceros) by Pietro Longhi.

In this way, Ca’ Rezzonico is transformed into a meeting point for the historic and contemporary, where the stories appear to us in all their complexity and density of value. The focus is on the horizon and accompanies  the decline of an era or, more accurately, various eras.

The velma, that gives the title at the exhibition, is the “meeting point” in the relationship between water and land, the symbol of something underwater that never stops emerging, thus becomes “an urgency of the present” and a bridge that connects us with the past.

_

In collaboration with
Fondazione Merz, Torino

Scientific coordination by : Gabriella Belli

Curated by : Beatrice Merz

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

_

Four young German artists, hosted for three months by the German Centre for Venetian Studies at the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza, had the opportunity to personally experience and analyse the relationship between Venice and its visitors.

Heike Gallmeier creates wild constructions in her studio that evoke comparisons with Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, but her concept is a different one: the apparent chaos culminates in a camera-made image that seems almost painted, with constant references to art history, including the Venetian Renaissance.

In Faire des clichés, Inga Kerber has portrayed people in Venice, a city that could itself be defined as a “place-cliché” that is characterised in turn by the presence of an infinite number of other clichés. She has tried to freeze the moment in which her subject – whether resident or visitor – is transformed, like an actor about to go on stage.

Klaus Kleine has “captured” the floor of Palazzo Barbarigo’s water door by means of a frottage technique. This has allowed him to experiment with reliefs of the surface and from them create freestanding sculptures. He has also made wooden forms coloured with the same black lacquer as the gondola on display on the ground floor, thus transposing the aesthetic and beauty of this unique form of vessel into a contemporary key.

Using film, Johanna von Monkiewitsch has captured and extrapolated certain effects of light in a number of specific places, then removed them from their original world in order to transmit them elsewhere via video projectors. For this exhibition, she filmed and isolated several Gibigiane, flashes of light fractured by the water at the Palazzo Ducale and at Palazzo Fortuny, subsequently projecting them onto the walls of the Ca’ Rezzonico entrance hall to stimulate the visitor’s perception.

_

Curated by: Petra Schaefer

With the support of:

Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani

L’Incaricata del Governo Federale della Repubblica di Germania per la Cultura e i Media

Dr. Christiane Hackerodt Kunst- und Kulturstiftung

Fondazione Berengo

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Exibition extended until 26 September 2016

_

Porcelain is perhaps the material that best embodies the spirit and aesthetic of the eighteenth century: glossy and light, it naturally lends itself to the creation of objects characterised by elegant, flowing lines.

For long kept a secret by Chinese manufacturers, it was re-created in Europe in the second decade of the eighteenth century at the Saxon court of Augustus the Strong and from there gradually spread across the continent, despite desperate attempts to hide the formula.

During the eighteenth century the Venetian Republic was the only state to have no less than four porcelain factories, all of them opened by private initiative. One of these was that of Geminiano Cozzi (1728 – 1798), born in Modena but Venetian by choice. It is to his extraordinary activity as an entrepreneur ante litteram that the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia is now dedicating the first ever retrospective, 250 years after the privilege granted to him by the Republic in 1765 (and which marks the real birth of the Cozzi manufacture).

It is no coincidence that the exhibition should be presented in the pòrtego on the first floor of Ca’ Rezzonico, the Museo del Settecento veneziano, a venue that in terms of its form and history is the best-suited to celebrating one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century art.

Curated by Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich, the exhibition features over six hundred pieces from Italian and foreign museums, including the few items to have a firm date and the many still in private collections and hitherto difficult of access to the public and to scholars, a circumstance that has not helped the fortune critique of Cozzi: only today is his work as artist and manufacture being being its due recognition within the European scene.

Unfolding in a development that is both chronological and thematic, the exhibition shows the evolution of Cozzi’s manufacture and of the types of decoration and various items, highlighting on the one hand one of the most fascinating art-historical events of the eighteenth century, and on the other by presenting an overview of a manufacturing activity of the period that includes items of surprising modernity.

The development of the art of porcelain in the eighteenth century in the Venetian Republic was undertaken by figures who were controversial, stubborn and fascinating.

One of these was the Giovanni Vezzi, goldsmith and merchant, who in 1720 started his own production in Venice; another was Nathaniel Friederich Hewelcke, a Saxon merchant who emigrated in 1757 from Meissen because of the closure of the factory during the Seven Years War; he requested and obtained a twenty-year privilege to manufacture “Saxon porcelain of any and all types” in Venice.

And aside from the aforementioned Geminiano Cozzi, we might also mention Giovanni Battista Antonibon, who in 1762 started production in Nove (VI) thirty years after obtaining the privilege from the Serenissima’ “Savi della Mercanzia” for the production of high-quality majolica quality for twenty years without having to pay taxes (1732).

Their destiny, however, despite the qualitatively extraordinary work, was not so lucky: after a few years, Vezzi and Hewelcke were obliged to abandon their businesses because of debts, and only Antonibon in Nove and Cozzi in Venice were able to establish long-lasting businesses, despite encountering difficulties on the way.

The exhibition can be visited during normal museum hours and with the same ticket, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (Antiga Edizioni, Crocetta del Montello, Treviso, 2016) which benefits from an international scientific committee and the collaboration of leading experts in the field.

_

Curated by Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich

With the contribution of:

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

May 9, 2015, 5 p.m.
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Venetian Eighteen Century Museum

_

A master of contemporary art and architecture, in recent years Corrado Levi has rediscovered his old love for music, a youthful enthusiasm that has returned to the centre of his experimental interests using a variety of artistic languages, and in particular for its being able to construct a deep relationship with architecture and with the sensorial sensitivities of the public.

For the 56th Venice Art Biennale, Levi is offering Musica ad Arte in the drawing room on the first floor of Ca’ Rezzonico, a performance centred on the correspondences between the emission of sounds of the cello and the manner of controlling the brush in painting.

The sounds – extended, brief, staccato, fluid, sliding, intense – that appear in some musical compositions are compared to different brushstrokes in works of art: rapid, hesitating, pecked, of infinite length.

A parallel between sound and paint is created forming a metaphor of the spirit to “explore – as Levi writes – some of its infinite forms and, who knows, to offer an invitation to you and I to think beyond”.

Duration approx 30 minuts.

Entrance by invitation only, subject to venue capacity.

_

Coordination: Gabriella Belli and Azalea Seratoni

L'articolo Performance sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

Extended until January 11, 2016

_

It is not often that there is an opportunity to trace in detail the history of a Venetian aristocratic family. One exception is the Pisani family of San Polo, better known by the epithet of Moretta.

The name of the Pisani household, one of the most prestigious in Venice, immediately evokes opulence and wealth. Divided into many branches, the best known was that of Santo Stefano, which was responsible for the construction of the grandiose villa of Stra (in the Venetian hinterland), and that of San Polo. It was a family with great wealth which also owned the beautiful Gothic palace on the Grand Canal, decorated around 1745 by the greatest artists active in Venice.

The family is also linked to an eponymous lawsuit, perhaps the most famous trial to take place in Venice in the 18th century, and whichprovides a perfect example of the social dynamics and contradictions of the Venetian nobility before the fall of the Serenissima.

The part of the family archive donated to the library of the Museo Correr by conte Leonardo de Lazara Pisani-Zusto in 1975 sheds some light on the Pisani Moretta family. But this is not the only link between the Moretta and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

Starting with some famous works by Canova, such as the Daedalus and Icarus and the plaster winged Cupid, and the family archive, the Pisani – and their heirs – have over more than a century sought to ensure that a number of the extraordinary works of art in their collection remain within the city of Venice.

Many of them are now at Ca’ Rezzonico and include the Death of Darius by Giambattista Piazzetta, the superb console tops by Benedict Corbarelli and the travel service in onyx and silver produced in Augsburg for the marriage between Pietro Vettor Pisani and Caterina Grimani.

The exhibition will document one of the most important examples of collecting in Venice, starting from this core of masterpieces and presenting approximately one hundred works that used to belong to the Pisani Moretta and have been loaned for the exhibition from numerous private collections.

In addition to paintings and sculptures, particular attention will be devoted to the decorative arts, such as the services in Murano glass, silverware, majolica and porcelain dishes, and lace. Also on display will be everyday objects and some curiosities documenting not only the taste but also the intimate daily life of one of the most prominent families of 18th-century Venice.

The exhibition, curated by Alberto Craievich, will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Antiga Edizioni and containing texts by Marcella Ansaldi, Letizia Caselli, Ileana Chiappini, Rossella Granziero, Giuseppe Gullino, Giuseppe Pavanello, Jan Rössler, Francesca Stopper and Giovanni C. F. Villa.

DOWNLOAD THE SELECTION OF MAIN WORKS ON DISPLAY (.PDF 212 KB) >>>
_

Admission is allowed with the hours and tickets of the museum >>>

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

From June 14, 2014 to May 4, 2015
Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice

In 1936, Nino Barbantini presented an exhibition at Ca’ Rezzonico dedicated to the porcelain of Venice and Nove to document an aspect that of 18th century Venetian Art that had hitherto been largely overlooked. The works displayed came above all from Venice’s civic collections and from museums and private collections throughout Italy.

The most generous lender however, was a Venetian, conte Marino Nani Mocenigo, an emblematic collector who had dedicated his existence to forming a collection of porcelain. Such was his obsession that he was given the affectionate nickname of “count cup” by his fellow citizens. Following his death, his wife decided to form a memorial to he rhusband by making accessible the collection he had formed with such passion. The objects were put on display at Ca’ del Duca, a tiny but excellent museum developed, but which it has been impossible to visit for a long time.

On this occasion, by request of the family, the porcelain collection of Marino Nani Mocenigo will be displayed in the rooms of Ca’ Rezzonico. The exhibition will present 338 pieces produced by the most important manufactories of Europe,with a predominant focus on about 100 Venetian articles – including some splendid examples by Vezzi, two very rare coffee-pots by Hewelcke, almost all the figural groups made by Pasquale Antonibon at Nove and Geminiano Cozzi in Venice – constituting the most conspicuous and important part of the exhibition. Perhaps the most famous work in the collection is a delightful Geographer by Geminiano Cozzi.

visitors can also admire some of the most famous works to have been produced by the Meissen factory, modelled by Johann Joachim Kändler and by Peter Reinicke, such as The Polish Kiss, The Chinese Girl, The Hunter, together with some astonishing dinner services, also from Meissen, dating from the early 18th century; one of these with gold decorations, and another in white porcelain with still lifes of fruit.

Together with Meissen, the exhibition will display examples of fine porcelain production from other German-speaking centres: a very rare part of a Chinoiserie dinner service made in Vienna by Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, and articles from Ludwigsburg, Frankenthal, Höchst and Berlin.

The exhibition closes with a large selection of cups and saucers by the imperial manufacture of Vienna dating from the Sorgenthal period, all characterised by an astonishing use of colour and bold combination of ornamental motifs.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Scripta Editore – Verona, and produced thanks to a contribution from the Venice International Foundation.

Curated by Marcella Ansaldi and Alberto Craievich

_

Admission is allowed with the hours and tickets of the museum >>>

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.

February 22 at 8 pm and February 23 at 6 pm
Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Soprano and mezzo-soprano concert, with a small female choir and a fortepiano. The concert will take place in the wonderful Ballroom of Ca’ Rezzonico.

Music: G.F.Handel, A. Dvořák, J. Haydn, G.Puccini, G.Verdi, A. Catalani, JF. Halévy

Coordination: Amici della Musica di Venezia

_

INFO E BOOKINGS:

ATTENTION: the admission will be allow only with uncover face

Ticket € 12,00 *

* Bookings fee is € 1,00

BUY ONLINE YOUR TICKET FOR THIS EVENT >>>

For further information: info@fmcvenezia.it

L'articolo Concerts sembra essere il primo su Ca' Rezzonico.