The new season opens with an extraordinary journey through the many ways of imagining and designing architecture, through the display of sheets from the Antonio Certani collection of the Giorgio Cini Foundation.
From 20 April to 17 September, the Palazzo Cini Gallery in San Vio will inaugurate the 2018 exhibition season with an exhibition that combines the beauty of design with the captivating architectures of deception in an original way: Architettura Immaginata is an exhibition that highlights, through the exhibition of a hundred drawings, the richness of the Antonio Certani collection of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, an exceptional collection of over 5.000 drawings acquired by Vittorio Cini in 1962, which brings together many genres and numerous exponents of the famous Bolognese school from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Thanks to Assicurazioni Generali, the Gallery's main partner since its reopening in 2014 and an institutional supporter of the Cini Foundation for many years, the exhibition season will be open to the public until 19 November 2018.
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, and by scholars of the Institute itself, the exhibition will lead the visitor on a fascinating journey through drawings linked to illusive and ornate architecture: squaring, backgrounds, perspectives, sets and samples of objects such as cartouches, ornamental vases and decorative elements that often decorate painted architecture, so visionary and curious as to almost represent the roots of design.
“This exhibition marks a new chapter in the process of enhancing the collections undertaken by the Istituto di Storia dell'Arte, which includes the studies resulting in the important publications relating to the collection of ancient art conserved in the Palazzo Cini Gallery and the collection of miniatures, but also the digitization and cataloging of documentary and photographic collections and the activities of the Centro Studi Vetro. – says Barbero – With Architettura Immaginata we want to show the general public masterpieces that have never been exhibited, rare and fascinating works that best represent an effervescent era in which architecture as deception, that is, architecture designed and painted, represented the heart of the 'artistic expression'. But there will also be a section dedicated to those ornate repertoires in which the power of imagination and technical mastery are expressed with surprising strength in zoomorphic and anthropomorphic forms and in an anthology of details.
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 important collections of graphics conserved by a private institution and mainly dedicated to Bolognese drawing and Emilian. Purchased by the bibliophile and antiquarian Tammaro De Marinis, it risked being dismembered and then dispersed; Vittorio Cini's decision to purchase it and allocate it as an integral fund to the Foundation's Institute of Art History ensured its preservation, thus allowing its conservation and study.
Architettura Immaginata aims to be a new appointment for the general public, an opportunity to visit Palazzo Cini and at the same time get to know a hitherto partially unknown aspect of the great collections of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, of which the house museum constitutes a vital and fascinating setting.
