Ca' Pesaro hosts exhibition on 19th-century Venetian portraiture that reconstructs a 100-year-old exhibition

From October 21, 2023, to April 1, 2024, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro in Venice presents the exhibition The Venetian Portrait of the Nineteenth Century, which aims to reconstruct the 1923 exhibition that Nino Barbantini, the first director of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, organized and set up precisely on the Venetian portrait of the nineteenth century. It was a highly successful exhibition, both by the public and the press, and is still considered fundamental for the rediscovery of the Venetian art of an entire century, for the beginning of the knowledge of its protagonists and the appreciation of many of the masterpieces that were exhibited there.

The initiative also inaugurated a new course for the Venetian Gallery and Barbantini’s activity, aimed, during the 1920s, at planning significant monographic exhibitions on periods or individual protagonists of Italian art. It also constitutes a valid and early museographic example of a review dedicated to a theme or a precise time frame. In the catalog produced by Barbantini there were 241 works by fifty artists, including painters, sculptors, and miniaturists, all active from the beginning until the penultimate decade of the century. The list, organized alphabetically, in addition to scant biographical information about the authors, included the names of the owners at the time.

From this information began the work of researching and identifying the works one hundred years after their exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro. Many of these, thanks in part to the success of the exhibition, became part of public collections, while others remained with heirs or, to a small extent, were permanently lost.

The current exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro is an opportunity to once again see the faces of numerous protagonists of society, art, culture, and the life of an enlarged territory that stretches from the Venetian capital to Friuli Venezia Giulia. Not only Venice, but also Treviso, Bassano, Padua, Trieste, Belluno, Udine, Pordenone, and Caneva di Sacile, were the places in which the scholar identified the specimens that testified to the artistic greatness of a century that had been wished to be forgotten in favor of the mythologizing of the previous one.

Image: Francesco Hayez, Matilde Pirovano Visconti, detail (c. 1840; oil on canvas; Private collection)

Ca' Pesaro hosts exhibition on 19th-century Venetian portraiture that reconstructs a 100-year-old exhibition

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