The Gallerie d'Italia in Vicenza are twenty years old and are celebrated by the exhibition Myth. Gods and heroes – from 6 April to 14 July – curated by Fernando Mazzocca, Federica Giacobello and Agata Keran. “2019 marks the twentieth birthday of the first museum project that our Bank launched in 1999, in Vicenza: the first branch of the Gallerie d'Italia. The decision to transform this building into a museum, into a place of art and culture, was intended as a gesture of openness towards the citizens. It bears witness to a deep-rooted sense of civic responsibility, which prompts us not to keep the architectural and artistic treasures owned with jealous confidentiality, but to share them with the public and spread their knowledge", commented Giovanni Bazoli, president emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo.
The one of Palazzo Leoni Montanari – the Vicenza headquarters of the Gallerie d'Italia – is the first of Intesa Sanpaolo's museums and from May of 1999 is one of the best-known artistic centers of the banking institution, which has crossed regional borders and initiated an artistic dialogue with national and international cultural institutions.
The exhibition invites you to rediscover theidentity of the building and investigates the fortune and exemplary nature of classical mythology to which it is linked, in accordance with the iconographic path of the pictorial and stucco decorations that characterize its architecture. Starting from the representation of myths and heroic characters in antiquity, the exhibition project focuses on the theme of mythology over the centuries, starting from Greece, Magna Graecia and Rome up to the exemplary arrival between seventeenth-century Classicism and the different seasons, between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of Neoclassicism.
The review that has over 60 works, sponsored by the Municipality of Vicenza, is organized in partnership with the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria from which very important works of art come from, and also from Pompeii, from some sites of Magna Graecia and a loan of great value, the Maecenas presents the Liberal Arts to Augustus by Giovan Battista Tiepolo, from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
The exhibition is divided into eight sections, each with a different theme and is articulated in a continuous confrontation between gods, heroes, myths.. Apollo, Athena, Marsyas, Niobe, Alexander the Great, Hercules, Achilles, are the protagonists of a journey through time and architectural space, in a constant cross-reference on the figurative and iconological level between the pictorial subjects of the decorations and the works on display, to discover the religious, moral and cultural meanings that the myth has assumed in different times and contexts, as stated in the note from the gallery.
The painted vases of the Intesa Sanpaolo collection dialogue with sculptures and frescoes of Greco-Roman art, analyzing the productive and figurative aspects, the influence and the translation into images of the most famous subjects, the interpretations proposed for the same myth by painters and sculptors; in the same way the pictorial works of Pompeo Batoni, Ignazio and Filippo Collino, Francesco Hayez, Louis Gauffier, Laurent Pecheux, Camillo Pacetti, Luigi Basiletti, Francesco and Luigi Righetti, Giambattista Tiepolo and Cristoforo Unterberger are evidence of how the ancient was considered as universal model of beauty and moral virtue in the neoclassical era.
