Discovering about the lifestyle of the Gonzaga court. Mantua, Palazzo Te's 2022 program.

The 2022 exhibition season of Palazzo Te in Mantua was presented this morning: the program, produced in collaboration with the City of Mantua and the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te, runs from March 26, 2022 to January 8, 2023 and focuses on the “lifestyle” of the Gonzaga court in Renaissance Mantua. Entitled Mantua: the art of living, it is coordinated by Palazzo Te’s director Stefano Baia Curioni and a committee composed of Barbara Furlotti (The Courtauld Institute), Davide Gasparotto (Getty Museum), Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld Gallery), Augusto Morari (Fondazione Palazzo Te), Guido Rebecchini (The Courtauld Institute), and Xavier Salomon (The Frick Collection), the project addresses the fundamental role of Renaissance courts in cultural production.

The goal of the program is to take the audience on a journey inside Palazzo Te by reconnecting the building and its pictorial decoration to the ephemeral objects and events it once housed, and for which it was originally created. For the men and women who inhabited these environments, the artifacts of the time, across the ambiguous line between art and craftsmanship, had the power to shape social interactions and ensure the uniqueness and diversity of their status.

One cannot define the art of living, says director Stefano Baia Curioni, “but if anything, recognize it when one encounters it in people, in their creations, in the ’things’ to which one has devoted one’s care. This marvelous (and always marvelous) Palazzo Te is full of allusions to an Art of Living that at times we seem to have lost: the sequence of the rooms, the fantasy, the reference to the Honesto Otium of the room of Cupid and Psyche, the objects ... that peek out from the banquettes, their multiform existence. So we decided this year to interrogate the Art of Living hidden and at the same time unveiled in Palazzo Te.”

First on the program, from March 26 to June 26, 2022, is the exhibition The Walls of Wonder. Court Corami tra i Gonzaga e l’Europa, curated by Augusto Morari, which rediscovers a form of wall decoration that was once much in vogue but is now lost, namely leather wall hangings. Even the Gonzagas, during the long period of their regency, commissioned and purchased corami of all types and motifs from the most renowned centers of leatherwork (Naples, Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and especially Venice), to furnish their residences, first and foremost Palazzo Te, in an incessant search for the refined, the beautiful, the marvelous. Developed in seven sections, the exhibition traces the fortunes and fascinating history of corami and their diffusion from the second half of the 15th century to the mid-17th century, thanks to loans from numerous museum institutions including Palazzo Madama in Turin, the Correr museums in Venice, Stibbert and Mozzi Bardini in Florence, and from the Museumslandschaft Hessen in Kassel. In addition, a reconstruction of a workshop of the master “auripellario” is being set up within the spaces of Palazzo Te, through which the public will become more familiar with the materials and techniques of making these particular wall furnishings.

The autumn appointment, from October 8, 2022 to January 8, 2023, is with the exhibition Giulio Romano. The Power of Things, curated by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, which explores the theme of metal works made to designs by sixteenth-century artists in particular Giulio Romano, but also Michelangelo and Francesco Salviati. The exhibition investigates the creative and technical processes behind the execution of the objects commissioned by the dukes of Mantua through the presentation of design pieces and drawings for silverware, tapestries and objects in bronze and precious metals, with a focus on weapons and armor. Prominent among these is the famous shield of Emperor Charles V of Madrid, which will be exceptionally exhibited together with the related drawing by Giulio Romano: a unique occasion that will allow visitors to enjoy one of the rare cases of survival of both artifacts to the present day. Equally important is the section devoted to the prince’s tableware, which testifies to the curious imagination of the court artists and the exceptional technical mastery of the master goldsmiths of the time. The painstaking selection of drawings highlights how Giulio Romano had found precisely in design the ideal dimension to express his most imaginative, playful and original vein.

Both exhibitions benefit from the collaboration with Factum Foundation, an international leader in the innovation and application of new technologies to the conservation of cultural heritage and in modern and functional museographic innovation, which presents for the first time the result of digital and material mediation techniques applied to the pieces on display. The collaboration also includes an extensive project of high-resolution digitization of three of Palazzo Te’s most famous rooms, with the intention of assisting the Foundation (which remains the owner of the collected data) in enhancing the work of documentation, conservation, study and dissemination of the rooms and their decorative apparatus.

Alongside the two exhibitions, the online conference The Taste for Things: the Design of Objects between Mantua and the European Courts of the Renaissance, curated by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, will be held on May 6, 2022, in which some of the leading international experts and scholars in the history of art and craftsmanship will be involved. The Foundation will then also offer the public a rich program of activities, in-depth events and entertainment to keep alive the relationship with all types of audiences. Along with summer events organized in collaboration with Michelangelo Foundation and Homo Faber, and public program appointments (including music, theater, dance, presentations and talks) from May to September, the Palazzo Te School will offer four theoretical and practical in-depth modules with art historians Guido Rebecchini and Stefania Gerevini, choreographer Virgilio Sieni, artist Stefano Arienti and artisan glassmaker and mosaicist Lino Reduzzi, and Carlos Bayod of the art production company Factum Arte.

The exhibition season Mantua: the Art of Living is promoted by the City of Mantua, produced and organized by Palazzo Te, with the contribution of Fondazione Banca Agricola Mantovana and PIC, in synergy with Mantua city of art and culture. Once again this year the exhibition project has been entrusted to Lissoni Associati, while the graphic design is developed by Lissoni Graphx.

Image: Fragment of corame with putto on red background, detail (16th century; 48 x 68 cm; Private collection)

Discovering about the lifestyle of the Gonzaga court. Mantua, Palazzo Te's 2022 program.

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