FROM DONATELLO TO ALESSANDRO VITTORIA, 1450 – 1600. 150 Years of Sculpture in the Republic of Venice

Curated by Toto Bergamo Rossi and Claudia Cremonini

Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro, Venezia
22 April – 30 October 2022

Promoted by:
Ministero della Cultura – Direzione regionale Musei Veneto
Venetian Heritage

Financed by:
Venetian Heritage

With the support of:
Banca Ifis, Venice Real Estate Knight Frank, Pro Venezia Svezia, Colnaghi

From Donatello to Alessandro Vittoria, 1450 – 1600. 150 Years of Sculpture in the Republic of Venice is the first major exhibition dedicated to Venetian sculpture curated by Toto Bergamo Rossi, director of Venetian Heritage and Claudia Cremonini, director of Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro.
Organized and financed by the Venetian Heritage Foundation, in collaboration with the Veneto Regional Directorate for Museums, the show, installed at the museum’s piano nobile, focuses on the dialogue between several works of masters operating in Venice and in the territories of the Republic between the 15^th and 17^th centuries, such as Donatello, Antonio Rizzo, Pietro, Tullio and Antonio Lombardo and also Jacopo Sansovino and Alessandro Vittoria, displaying, in addition to pieces already known to the general public, some sculptures never seen in museum contexts. The exhibition aims to give back to the visitors the interpretative variety of the sculptural technique, underlining its value and the richness of aesthetic declinations and materials within a historical-artistic context that too often prefers painting in the artistic discourse on Venice. Thanks to important loans from national and international institutions and private collections, the exhibition centers on the most significant moments of a much broader and far-reaching event, that of sculptural production in the Veneto region from the early Renaissance to the late Mannerist period, highlighting the complexity and richness of the stylistic and iconographic contributions that converged to Venice in years of great renewal for local figurative culture.
The Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro, with one of the most important collections in the city in terms of the quality of its works from different periods and types, has always been one of the cornerstones of the merging of private and public collections in Venice, and the place of excellence for the concentration of sculptural masterpieces from dispersed monumental contexts, largely conceived for dismembered or no longer existing ecclesiastical complexes in the lagoon area. The presence of a prestigious collection of bronzes and sculptures from the Veneto region – mainly from the Renaissance, but with valuable examples dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – is the result of the original intention to allocate to Ca’ d’Oro important testimonies of the vanished Venice that enriched the nucleus originating from Baron Franchetti’s bequest.
The exhibition, which sees the collaboration of Marsilio Arte for the general organization and coordination of communication, as well as for the publication of the catalog that documents the show through an important photographic campaign created for the occasion.