Imagined Architecture from the 16th to the 19th century: an exhibition at the Palazzo Cini Gallery in Venice

Until September 17, 2018, the exhibition Architettura immaginata: un viaggio attraverso i molti modi d’immaginare e disegnare l’architettura( Imagined Architecture: a journey through the many ways of imagining and drawing architecture) is underway (it opened last April 20) at the Galleria di Palazzo Cini in San Vio, Venice, through the exhibition of sheets from the Antonio Certani collection of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. The exhibition, in the year of the Architecture Biennale, aims to unveil to the public a selection of a hundred drawings ranging from the 16th to the 19th century and distinguished by their extraordinary variety. Visitors will thus be able to embark on a journey among drawings related to illusionary and ornate architecture: quadratures, breakthroughs, perspectives, stage sets and samples of objects such as cartouches, ornamental vases and decorative elements that often adorn painted architecture, so visionary and curious that they almost represent the roots of design.

“This exhibition,” explains curator Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s Institute of Art History, "marks a new chapter in the path of enhancing the collections undertaken by the Institute of the History of Art.Art, in which are included the studies that resulted in the important publications on the collection of ancient art preserved in the Gallery of Palazzo Cini and the collection of miniatures, but also the digitization and cataloging of documentary and photographic funds and the activities of the Glass Study Center. With Architettura Immaginata we want to show the general public masterpieces that have in part never been exhibited, rare and fascinating works that best represent an effervescent era in which architecture as deception, that is, drawn and painted architecture, represented the heart of artistic expression." The exhibition will also not lack a section devoted to those ornate repertoires in which the power of imagination and technical mastery are expressed with surprising force in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms and in a florilegium of details.

All the sheets come from the Certani collection, established in the first half of the last century by the Emilian cellist and composer Antonio Certani (Vedrana di Budrio, 1879 - Bologna, 1952), is one of the most remarkable graphic art collections preserved by a private institution and devoted mainly to Bolognese and Emilian drawing. Purchased by the bibliophile and antiquarian Tammaro De Marinis, it risked being dismembered and then dispersed; ensuring its preservation was intervened in 1962 by Vittorio Cini’s decision to purchase it and allocate it as an intact fund to the Foundation’s Institute of Art History, thus enabling its preservation and study. The collection consists of more than five thousand drawings.

For all information about the exhibition you can visit the Palazzo Cini website.

Imagined Architecture from the 16th to the 19th century: an exhibition at the Palazzo Cini Gallery in Venice

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