Curated by Francesca Barbi Marinetti

From Wednesday, June 19th to Sunday, July 28th, 2024

Museo Nazionale Romano - Palazzo Altemps

Piazza Sant’Apollinare 46 – Rome

Opening hours:

From Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM

(last admission at 6:00 PM)

At Palazzo Altemps, the venue of the Museo Nazionale Romano, an extensive exhibition dedicated to one of the most original and fascinating scholars in the history of Italian art, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, has been inaugurated. Previously presented in a partial preview in November and December 2023 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, with over 16,000 visitors, the Roman exhibition now gathers an impressive series of paintings: twenty-four. In these works, the artist Corrado Veneziano strives to merge his most authentically contemporary research with Cavalcaselle’s revolutionary “investigations,” all focused on medieval and Renaissance Italian art. The exhibition "Painting Cavalcaselle, with a clear hand," curated by Francesca Barbi Marinetti, will be open to the public from Wednesday, June 19th to Sunday, July 28th, 2024.

Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) is indeed a subject of great intellectual plurality, starting from his professional and civil biography. After fighting for independence during the Risorgimento and enduring exile (he was sentenced to death by the Austrian Government in Lombardo Veneto), Cavalcaselle became director of the first post-unification Ministry of Culture. Here, continuing his artistic vocation, he refined a distinctly “investigative” component by systematically studying Italian and European artworks to determine their true authorship.

To establish whether a painting was Italian (and not Belgian, French, or Dutch, as was sometimes believed) or by Giovanni Bellini (and not Giorgione), Piero della Francesca (and not Van Eyck), Cavalcaselle traveled extensively across the Peninsula and much of Europe. He traveled tirelessly from Sicily to Friuli, from Rome to Madrid, Paris, Brussels, London, St. Petersburg.

He entered merchant warehouses, public museums, churches, and even cellars; there, he often discovered masterpieces that had been completely ignored or overlooked until then. To support his insights more solidly, Cavalcaselle recorded notes in a vast array of small books: his famous “travel notebooks”; he filled them with sketches, shapes, faces, details, and then wrote alongside, on the margins of the pages, his deductions, doubts, and “discoveries.”

Cavalcaselle’s insights influenced the field (he authored the first “History of Italian Art,” of unified Italy, written with the Englishman Joseph Archer Crowe); his drawings remain unsurpassed examples of love and philology, passion, and scientific criteria to correct the many (sometimes instrumental) falsifications of previous history and art.

Corrado Veneziano – an Italian artist whose works are permanently exhibited in European and international institutional museums, recently invited to France under the patronage of the Louvre, and author of the work that became the Italian postage stamp dedicated to Hell – has studied the Veronese author extensively and reinterpreted his sketches and notebooks.

His pictorial work starts from Cavalcaselle and visually reinterprets the artworks – the colors, textures, techniques – of Cimabue, Antonello da Messina, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Titian, and many others, creating a sort of clear “third life” of the same paintings. On this chromatic and figurative tapestry, Veneziano then adds the “phrases”: those scientific notes and deductions of Cavalcaselle that participate in, share, and develop the overall communicative thrust of the work. The words themselves – symbols of the Italian language, sometimes English – become symbols and signs with the elegant dynamic propulsion of the brilliant Venetian author.

The Director of the Museo Nazionale Romano, Stèphane Verger, expresses his pleasure with Corrado Veneziano’s exhibition: "The Museo Nazionale Romano is pleased to present to the public at Palazzo Altemps an exhibition where the pictorial work accompanies and reflects a study and research effort, giving life and materiality to the theoretical work of one of the founding fathers of modern art criticism. Within the exhibition path and in the gallery of temporary exhibitions, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle’s notebooks become paintings and transform into new points of reflection for visitors, like in a refined game of mirrors."

The President of the Culture Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Federico Mollicone, supports the value of contemporary art that proposes innovative interpretations of the history of Italian art: "Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle was an innovator in art history, the first to undertake a path of study and valorization of art worldwide, taking notes in travel notebooks, where he reproduced sketches of what he saw. Veneziano’s initiative to reinterpret these and create a path involving many Renaissance and contemporary Italian artists is commendable."

Francesca Barbi Marinetti, curator of the exhibition, emphasizes: “For Veneziano, a scholar of languages and their semantic and symbolic evocation, the tribute to Cavalcaselle is a striking encounter: for the aesthetics of the very composite material of Cavalcaselle’s notebooks. With drawings, collages, and annotations, he discovers it to be rich in affinities with contemporary taste and with his personal pictorial research.”

Corrado Veneziano describes his artistic connection with Cavalcaselle: “I worked extensively on Cavalcaselle’s sketches. The paintings I created became a rich immersion in Renaissance and medieval techniques. It was also a confirmation of the irreplaceable pleasure of the hand that paints, in its splendid craftsmanship. Despite the encroachment of every technology or artificial intelligence.”

The overall effect – also thanks to the arrangement of the works, some in direct dialogue with the magnificent halls and the famous statues of Palazzo Altemps – is objectively engaging: simultaneously sacred and scientific, spiritual and secular: twenty-four paintings that layer the senses and the strength of previous works, contributing to their rebirth and revitalization.

“Corrado Veneziano. Painting Cavalcaselle, with a clear hand” benefits from the support of the Presidency of the Culture Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and the ICAS (Interparliamentary Group for Culture, Art, and Sport), the coordination of the D.d’Arte association, and the support of Iacovelli and Partners and the Civita association.

Palazzo Altemps

An aristocratic residence where, as early as the 16th century, a rich collection of ancient sculpture was housed – in a magnificent architectural setting – Palazzo Altemps is the venue of the Museo Nazionale Romano dedicated to the history of collecting. Located a few steps from Piazza Navona, near the left bank of the Tiber, in Campo Marzio, the first core of the palace was built in the 15th century by Girolamo Riario, lord of Imola, ambitious nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. Passing into other ownership, in 1568 the building was purchased by Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps, of Austrian origin, nephew of Pope Pius IV. The cardinal established his residence there, which, expanded and embellished with painted decorations, was made worthy of rank by housing – according to the taste of the time – the magnificent collection of antiquities and the valuable library collection. The Altemps family resided there for a long time, until the mid-19th century when, due to widowhood and romantic entanglements, the property was inherited by Giulio Hardouin, father of the duchess Maria who married Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1883 in the church of S. Aniceto at Palazzo Altemps. By the end of the century, the building was sold to the Holy See, which allocated it to the Pontifical Spanish College. In 1982, the first act of acquisition of Palazzo Altemps by the Italian State occurred; a long and rigorous restoration culminated in the successful opening of the museum to the public in December 1997. The completion of the acquisition (2006) and restoration work now allows visitors to view the building in its entirety.

The Museo di Palazzo Altemps hosts absolute masterpieces of ancient sculpture from famous noble collections of great value that have become state property. The layout aims to integrate – in a harmonious combination – the marbles into the decorative context of the rooms, keeping in mind and re-proposing solutions adopted in the arrangement of antiquarian collections. The two-story visiting path reveals a succession of decorated rooms, an intricate maze of stairs and corridors leading from one discovery to another. Alongside the statues and reliefs from the Altemps, Boncompagni Ludovisi, Mattei, Del Drago collections, the Jandolo, Veneziani, Brancaccio sculptures, the Egyptian collection, the famous Pallavicini Rospigliosi frescoes, and works from exceptional finds and recovered from the antiquarian market, there is also the countless archaeological collection of Evan Gorga, an eccentric collector of the early 20th century. With an interesting shift, one moves from the 16th and 17th-century collections to the minute materials that testify to modern archaeological collecting.

Press contacts:

Museo Nazionale Romano

Angelina Travaglini

[email protected]

Exhibition press office

Elisabetta Castiglioni

+39 328 4112014

[email protected]