GUSTO NEOCLASSICO
L’Album Cicognara

From 26 September 2025 to 12 January 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 12 January, 2026 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.