Vicenza, new display for Palazzo Leoni Montanari's large collection of Russian icons

From July 3, 2021, Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia in Vicenza, identified as the home of icons since the museum’s opening in 1999, will offer the public a selection of seventy Russian icons from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, displayed in a renewed permanent exhibition. Until July 3, 2022, the museum itinerary, in the first floor spaces, is enriched by the dialogue with the works of contemporary artist Valery Koshlyakov. The project is curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, Directors of the Center for the Study of the Arts of Russia (CSAR) at Ca Foscari University Venice.

The selection of icons offers the opportunity to contemplate a wide sequence of masterpieces of sacred art in Russia, different in terms of periods and places of their production. Peculiar aspects of the iconic language (timbral color, compositional geometry, proportions of importance, inverted perspective) urge the viewer to abandon schemes related to representation based on criteria of verisimilitude, in order to discover the symbolic richness of a language only apparently naive. Articulated thematically and diachronically, the exhibition follows the gradual development over time, from the 13th to the 19th century, of this art practiced mainly by monks iconographers, within the workshops present in the cenobia. Their artistic expression was destined to remain completely anonymous, unsigned, as it was offered humbly and silently as an oblation to God and as a gift of charity (brotherly love) for the world. Spiritually guided by divine inspiration, the lysographer writes his own visual message of faith by honoring the memory of tradition and ideally projecting such work into the future, under the banner of eschatological events.

The new display of Russian icons at Palazzo Leoni Montanari

The arrangement of the collection

The layout is prepared with new museographic criteria, to accommodate and narrate the icons through innovative ways of display and fruition: the choice was to move from an exhibition to an experience. The visitor is accompanied inside the world of the representation of the sacred in the Russian tradition, which is embodied in the Orthodox rite, daily relived: the rite that Florensky indicated as a living synthesis of the arts contrasting it with the neutral space of the museum.

The first room of the exhibition itinerary, immersive and multisensory, is a narrative environment that initiates a dialogue between the millenary Russian civilization of the depiction of the sacred and an updated Western gaze, respectful and rigorous towards that tradition and at the same time committed to providing the visitor with adequate and stimulating keys to understanding it. The room welcomes visitors at the beginning of their visual journey into Russian Orthodox spirituality: while for the West licona is simply an artifact made in a particular historical period, in Russia it is an ever-living organism. Licona is word in images, an act of prayer and a liturgical instrument: it is not an object to be observed (and admired), but the living sign in a dimension of devotion and contemplation. Produced by Moscow’s Studio Arts Media, directed by Nikita Tichonov, the video immerses the audience in theintensity of the rituals of the Church of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Mother of God, in the village of Pavlovskaya Sloboda, Moscow Region.

In the second room, along with some of the most representative icons in the collection, about 30 panels have been placed side by side to form a kind of iconostasis (the wall that in Orthodox churches separates the space of the faithful from the chancel that only priests can enter), so that visitors can understand the primary function of icons in the Russian tradition. In the third room, a dialogue between the world of the icon and modern and contemporary artistic expressions, which refer to that ancient matrix, is offered periodically. On this occasion the comparison is with one of the greatest living Russian artists, Valery Koshlyakov. Born in 1962 in Salsk, southern Russia, Koshlyakov has lived in Paris for many years and often uses materials of explicit poverty to make his works: cardboard, packing tape, overlapping layers of oil paint and spray paint. After a long and extensive reconnaissance of popular architecture and everyday objects that he felt referred back to the compositional structure of theicona, Koshlyakov has over the past five years created a wide sequence of ikonosy, signs that bring together the arrangements of the backgrounds of theicona to the actuality of the present. The Heavenly Architectures exhibition is composed of a core of ikonosy specially created by the artist in close dialogue with four icons selected from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, in which the presence of details that have since migrated, transforming, into his architectural fantasies can be discerned.

In the fourth and final room, along with didactic content on the technique of icon making, some of the metal coverings (rize and basme) that protected and embellished the painted panels over the centuries are displayed. The exhibition concludes with a multimedia touchscreen installation, curated by camerAnebbia, Milan, which provides essential information about thelicona and its stages of creation, with a specific focus on menologues, icons representing saints and religious festivals in the liturgical calendar. Also new is the vault where icons from the collection not presented in the exhibition halls are kept, available (upon request) to scholars and connoisseurs. Lambiente, which spans two floors, is equipped with a system of racks that houses the precious plates and allows the works to be preserved according to the most up-to-date museum standards. Numerous collateral initiatives are planned for the exhibition project: guided tours and thematic itineraries to discover the symbolic language of icons or to approach the imagery of a contemporary artist; animated stories for children and free educational activities for schools of all grades.

The new display of Russian icons at Palazzo Leoni Montanari

History of the collection of Russian icons at Palazzo Leoni Montanari

The Gallerie d’Italia - Palazzo Leoni Montanari houses Intesa Sanpaolo’s collection of Russian icons. The original nucleus, consisting of a private Italian collection acquired in the early 1990s, was later enriched by a number of plates of great artistic value from the 15th-16th centuries and two extraordinary Novgorod icons from the second half of the 13th century, depicting the Descent to the Underworld and the Ascensionto Heaven of the prophet Elijah. These acquisitions did not simply increase the collection (consisting today of 462 specimens), but gave it, even in the eyes of specialists in Byzantine and Old Russian art, a radically new status. In the consensus opinion of experts, the collection is among the most important in the West, both in terms of the total number of works and the presence of extremely rare masterpieces from the high period.

Covering a very broad chronological span, from the 13th to the 19th century, the collection documents the different phases of Russian icon painting between the Middle Ages and the modern age, through its many schools and artistic centers. Alongside icons from Moscow, Novgorod, Vladimir, Tver, and Pskov, illustrious and widely known schools, there are prestigious examples from the provincial areas of central and northern Russia, where workshops often located along the trade routes of the regions crossed by the Volga River operated. The main feature of Intesa Sanpaolo’s collection, even in comparison with collections in Eastern Europe and Russia itself, is the large amount of space devoted to works created in the 18th and 19th centuries, the period following the reforms of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725), evidence of a lively expressiveness and a great variety of styles that restores dignity and value to eras hitherto little considered.

The entire collection since its acquisition has been placed under the tutelage of an international scientific committee, coordinated by Carlo Pirovano and composed of Engelina S. Smirnova, John Lindsay Opie (recently deceased), and Eva Haustein-Bartsch, which in 2003 edited the catalog raisonné of the entire corpus (Electa, Milan) and which over time has overseen the conservation work on the plates.

In 1999, after the rooms on the upper floor of Palazzo Leoni Montanari were converted to exhibition space, designed by architect Alberico Belgioioso, a nucleus of 140 icons was exhibited as part of a permanent itinerary that from the outset fostered the identification of the bank’s first museum venue as the casa dellicona. In 2018, having begun a phase of reorganization of the palace’s exhibition areas, the Russian icons were temporarily housed in the storage room attached to the galleries for a conservation program with a view to new ways of valorization.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the birth of the House of the Icons, and especially to ensure an updated enjoyment of the collection, a collaboration agreement was therefore signed in 2019 with Ca Foscari University of Venice and the Center for the Study of the Arts of Russia, which resulted in the elaboration of the scientific project for the exhibition Kandinsky, Gončarova, Chagall. Sacred and Beauty in Russian Art, presented at the Gallerie d’Italia in Vicenza from Oct. 5, 2019 to Jan. 26, 2020, and in the new permanent arrangement of the icon collection, which is now on display on the ground floor of the palace in a renewed immersive itinerary curated by Professor Giuseppe Barbieri and Professor Silvia Burini. The value of the project is twofold, which next to the exhibition halls, where the public will be able to return to admire about 70 specimens in the collection, has seen the creation of a new, well-equipped storage room that, in the rooms adjacent to the museum area and the teaching room, is concrete evidence of Intesa Sanpaolo’s commitment to the protection and enhancement of the artistic heritage it owns.

The new display of Russian icons at Palazzo Leoni Montanari

Vicenza, new display for Palazzo Leoni Montanari's large collection of Russian icons

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