Trento, Buonconsiglio Castle Museum turns 100 years old. A year of celebrations

Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento is celebrating its first 100 years: in fact, the castle museum was founded in 1924. To mark the anniversary, this year will feature a full calendar of events with exhibitions, publications, extraordinary evening openings and much more. The birthday will be celebrated on April 27, 2024, with events that will start in the museum and develop outside the walls involving also Exhibition Square.

There will be concerts and encounters such as the talk by philosopher Umberto Galimberti, who takes his cue from the Centennial motto or Conosci te stesso that stands out on the 16th-century mirror of the Venetian Loggia to create a dialogue with the public on the theme. This famous phrase from the classical world is an invitation to scrutinize oneself in depth, marking Western thought over time and detecting itself relevant even in our day. It is an exhortation that, while in its original meaning was probably meant to be an invitation to understand one’s own human limitation in the face of the divine, it became, as early as Socrates and the greatest thinkers, a spur to cultivate one’s own interiority, soul and intellect in order to achieve full self-awareness and self-realization. It is precisely because of that complex of important meanings that the ancient symbol of the mirror linked to that exhortation served as the inspiration for the museum’s new logo, which has been adopted since 2018 as part of an ambitious revision and updating project that is still ongoing.

This same symbol is also at the root of the Centennial celebration logo, from the year 1924 to 2024. The museum, with its branch offices, holds more than 120 thousand artifacts and applied art collections. Thanks to this wealth, the Buonconsiglio museum system has managed to increase the proposal of annual temporary exhibitions, events, and initiatives, strengthening the conservation and enhancement efforts and being visited by more than 300 thousand people. The two new museum venues in Ala, in two buildings granted by the municipality, will show unique collections of textiles and antique pianos, retracing new stories of creativity and art. The Castello del Buonconsiglio, will apply at the prestigious European Royal Residences Association, concluding what has been planned in recent years of major work: construction of the elevator inside the building to achieve full accessibility of the museum. Going hand in hand with these goals are the arrangement of the surrounding areas, with the construction of the new Specialist Library in the old Pallacorda area, the use of the premises recovered from the transfer of the library holdings to place there a modern food court, spacious and independent of the museum area and its constraints on use, and the arrangement of some areas of the garden to reopen ancient paths. The aim is to create a dense year of activities and initiatives aimed at highlighting and enhancing the deep connection between the history of Buonconsiglio Castle and its surrounding context, with the goal of rediscovering the museum as a relational, engaging and experiential place.

As a first step in the centennial celebrations, the exhibition Museo Anno Zero was opened in December 2023. Recovered Works 1919-1923, which can be visited until May 5, 2024. In the context of the peace negotiations at the end of World War I, the exhibition presents the events through which the figure of Giuseppe Gerola brought back home and permanently deposited at the Castello del Buonconsiglio, numerous works of art and documentary evidence from Trentino that had long since migrated to major Austrian museum collections. In fact, Gerola recovered some of the most important pieces in the current collections: the extremely rare 5th-century Gospel Book on purple parchment, the 1042 Udalrician Sacramentary, the six 15th-century Trentino Musical Codices, and the Madruzzi bronze Fontanella. It also collected archaeological finds from numerous localities such as Civezzano and Doss Trento, dozens of codices, and the most important archival documents of the Episcopal Principality preserved in the State Archives of Trent.

Also in the initiatives related to the history of the museum is the exhibition With Sword and Cross. Longobards in Civezzano scheduled from March 22 to October 20, born out of the close synergy between the castle and the Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, which holds a collection of Longobard artifacts of Trentino origin, acquired in the mid-19th century. It will in fact be a further stage that will lead to an in-depth study of the history of the Lombards in Trentino, thanks to the artifacts and gold masterpieces found in the tombs of the princess and prince of Civezzano and the new research and excavations in the area conducted by the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage.

Instead, the major summer exhibition will be dedicated to Albrecht Dürer with Dürer and the Origins of the Renaissance in Trentino, scheduled from July 6 to October 20 and will address the cultural dynamics of the area between Trentino and Tyrol. Starting with the famous artist who crossed the Alps and passed through our territory in 1494-95, The beginnings of that particular Renaissance that developed in Trentino between 1470 and 1530/40 will be examined in detail, a phenomenon that embraced painting, sculpture and applied arts, supported by the most important Trentino prince-bishops of German and Italian origin, such as Johannes Hinderbach and Bernardo Cles, in its broadest aspects. Along this thread, which also intends to enhance the heritage preserved in the territory, extraordinary paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings by important artists such as Albrecht Dürer,Vivarini, Bartolomeo Dill Riemenschneider, Jorg Artzt, Max Reichlich, Michael Pacher, Girolamo Romanino and others, from major museum institutions such as the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, the Correr Museum, the Museum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Strada Nuova Museums in Genoa, and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena.

Trento, Buonconsiglio Castle Museum turns 100 years old. A year of celebrations

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