Art from the 14th to the 19th century in Ticino's public collections.

Expanding the horizon beyond the precious but narrow confines of its own collection, the Giovanni Züst Cantonal Art Gallery presents an exhibition that brings together some of the most significant works dating from the period between the late Middle Ages and the second half of the 19th century preserved in Ticino's public collections.

The exhibition, in which the Pinacoteca's works are complemented by loans from other institutions, provides an overview of an art-historical heritage usually located in different places and not always accessible to the public.

Within the unified framework of a museographic arrangement in which the chronological order is articulated through thematic and genre groupings, the visitor has the opportunity to admire paintings and sculptures preserved, in addition to the Pinacoteca Züst, at the Art Museum of Italian Switzerland, the State Archives, the Rusca House Museum, the Vela Museum, the Mendrisio Art Museum, the Villa dei Cedri Museum, the Blenio Valley Ethnographic and Historical Museum and in some ecclesiastical buildings.

Thanks to the possibility of establishing fruitful comparisons between artistic testimonies that are often of great value, the itinerary gives an account of the richness of this heritage and at the same time sketches in brief a history of Ticino art during the centuries examined, highlighting its protagonists and main junctures. A history that is distinguished not only by the conspicuous and prolonged emigration of artistic workers but also by the very close relationship that binds Ticino to the Lombard and more generally Italian area. The exhibition, which includes not only Ticino artists, also documents the historiographic approaches and choices of taste that have characterized since the second half of the 19th century the birth and development, not always organic and coherent, of public collections in Italian-speaking Switzerland.

Almost fifty years after the exhibition Presenze d'arte in Ticino dal XV al XVIII secolo (Presences of art in Ticino from the 15th to the 18th century), which was hosted in the spaces of Villa Ciani in 1979, a reconnaissance of the heritage of ancient art conserved in the various Ticino museum institutes is presented in order to promote a common reflection on the management and unified valorization of these collections, also in view of the renovation and expansion of which the Pinacoteca will be the object in the coming years.

About a hundred works are on display, including, in addition to some of the masterpieces by the two main exponents of 17th-century Ticino painting, Giovanni Serodine and Pier Francesco Mola, paintings and sculptures by Bernardino Luini, Tommaso Rodari, Domenico Fetti, Joos de Momper, Giuseppe Antonio Petrini, Angelika Kauffmann, Carlo Bossoli, Vincenzo Vela and Antonio Ciseri.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Pinacoteca will also host for the first time an important work by the Master of the Denim Canvas that recently became part of the collection thanks to the generosity of the Dr. Joseph Scholz Foundation, which for years has been helping to enrich the collections of major Swiss museums, including the Kunsthaus Zurich. The painting Mother Beggar with Two Children, one of the most significant works by this still-anonymous author who has enjoyed increasing critical attention in recent years, is part of the strand of "reality painting," in vogue in the seventeenth century throughout Europe, which did not disdain the depiction of characters belonging to the humbler social classes, often dressed in rags and caught in their everyday life. The painter owes his name to the presence, in many of his works, of the blue moleskin fabric produced in Genoa that we now commonly call blue jeans.
In the fall, the Pinacoteca will devote a major retrospective to one of the major figures in Lombard and Italian painting of the 18th century, Ticino-born Giuseppe Antonio Petrini(1677-1759). More than 30 years after the exhibition presented in Lugano in 1991, the show will provide a unique opportunity to admire some of the Carona painter's major masterpieces brought together in one place.


Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.