Palazzo Te opens exhibition season with an exhibition on court corams

Opening on March 26 and open to the public until June 26, 2022 at Palazzo Te in Mantua, the exhibition The Walls of Wonders. Court Coramas between the Gonzaga and Europe, curated by Augusto Morari. The exhibition kicks off Fondazione Palazzo te ’s 2022 exhibition season “Mantua: the Art of Living,” dedicated to the lifestyle of the Gonzaga court in Renaissance Mantua. The annual project is coordinated by director Stefano Baia Curioni, with a committee consisting 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), and proposes a novel journey into the 16th-century residence, reconnecting the building and its pictorial decoration to the ephemeral objects and events it once housed.

With this exhibition The Walls of Wonders is intended to investigate and rediscover the exceptional nature of the precious leather decorative apparatuses that in the Renaissance decorated the rooms of the palaces of the most important European courts.

“The exhibition, which we owe to the indefatigable passion of Augusto Morari,” says director Baia Curioni, “is a double opportunity for happiness: to learn about the ancient art of bringing magic to palaces by decorating fantastic walls and to see Palazzo Te as it was imagined at the time of its creation.”

Corami, formerly very much in vogue and now almost entirely lost, were used during special celebratory occasions and in everyday life, arranged on the walls between the ornamentation of the upper part and the floor, with a dual function: one of a practical order as an insulator, the other of a more scenic character to flaunt wealth. The Gonzagas also commissioned and purchased corami of all types and motifs from the most renowned centers of leatherworking, such as Naples, Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and especially Venice, to furnish their residences, first and foremost Palazzo Te, in a constant quest for the refined and beautiful.

Visitors will have the opportunity to visit Palazzo Te as we have never seen it, through the exhibition of a selection of about sixty works on loan from prestigious Italian and foreign museums, including the Correr Museums and Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, Palazzo Madama in Turin, Stibbert and Mozzi Bardini in Florence, the State Archives of Mantua, and the Museumslandschaft Hessen in Kassel, and from private collections.

Beginning with the discovery of an unpublished 16th-century corami traced by curator Augusto Morari to Gonzaga ownership, ascertained and confirmed by the recovery under the old lining of the Gonzaga weapon stamps, the exhibition is divided into seven sections that trace the fortunes and history of these objects of the highest technical and aesthetic finesse, and their diffusion from the second half of the 15th century to the mid-17th century. “The investigation of corami,” declares the curator, “develops from two Mantuan testimonies: the 1464 letter from Francesco Gonzaga to his mother Barbara of Brandenburg in which he announces to her the gift of ’four shovels of Cordovan leather to adorn the walls’; and a significant ’clue’ contained in Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta, where the artist paints a curtain imitating a Hispano-Moorish corami, dense with meaning.” “It is precisely from this detail,” Morari explains, “that the exhibition itinerary centered on the corame that belonged to the Gonzaga family opens: an extraordinary piece composed of leather modules with a blue background and ogival mesh designs, with a pomegranate in the center, silver-plated as a mecha. I would like to thank the many institutions that participated in the realization of the exhibition by lending precious works, little known to the public, in some cases restored just for this occasion. Heartfelt thanks also to collectors in Mantua, Florence and Cremona for their generous cooperation.”

In addition to the rich selection of more than twenty-five corami and leather artifacts, some of which are presented to the public for the first time, the rooms of Palazzo Te will display fine textiles from the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries with oriental motifs that testify to the spread of the taste for the exotic and the fashion for new decorative types, characterized by designs inspired by nature; paintings and drawings inspired by the inflorescence trend that strongly influenced artistic productions during the seventeenth century; letters and archival documents testifying to the Gonzaga court’s countless requests and wild purchases.

Thanks to the collaboration with Factum Foundation, also on display in the Camera dei Venti is a 3D reworking of the Corame with flower vases from the Musée des arts decoratifs in Paris: digitized in very high resolution using the Lucida 3D Scanner and composite photography, the corame has been recreated life-size, adapting it to the spaces, in a copy that aims to restore the delicacy of its surface to the public. In the refined composition of the work, referred to possibly Venetian master coramari, birds and various flowers such as tulips appear, fanning out with reminiscences of Turkish and Persian culture.

Inside the exhibition spaces, in order to illustrate and explore the complex technical processes initially inherited from the Moors and Arabs of Spain, a workshop of the master “auripellario” is also set up with the materials used for the execution and decoration of the wall furnishings.

The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Mantua, produced and organized by Palazzo Te, with contributions from Fondazione Banca Agricola Mantovana, Claipa and PIC, and with technical support from Glas Italia and Pilkington - NSG Group, in collaboration with Factum Foundation, with the support of Friends of Palazzo Te and Mantua Museums, and in synergy with Mantua city of art and culture.

For info: www.centropalazzote.it

Image: Roman manufacture, Fragment of corame with Harpies (16th century; 315 x 62 cm; Ariccia, Museo di Palazzo Chigi)

Palazzo Te opens exhibition season with an exhibition on court corams

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