Art from the 14th to the 19th century in the public collections of Ticino. An overview

O ovoj lokaciji

The Giovanni Züst Cantonal Gallery broadens its horizon beyond the valuable but limited bounds of its own collection and presents an exhibition that brings together some of the most important works from the Late Middle Ages to the second half of the 19th century, held in the public collections of Ticino. The exhibition, in which the works of the Pinacoteca are complemented by loans from other institutions, gives you an overview of a rich but fragmented artistic heritage, usually scattered across different places and not always accessible to the public. Within the unified setting of a museographic display, where the chronological order is structured by thematic and genre-based groupings, you have the chance to admire paintings and sculptures held not only in the Pinacoteca Züst, but also in the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, the State Archives, the Museo di Casa Rusca, the Museo Vela, the Museum of Art of Mendrisio, the Museo di Villa dei Cedri, the Historical and Ethnographic Museum of the Blenio Valley, as well as in some church buildings. Thanks to the chance to make fruitful comparisons between artistic testimonies often of great value, the exhibition route highlights the richness of this heritage while also sketching, in broad terms, a history of Ticinese art over the centuries considered, underlining the main protagonists and the most important turning points. A history marked not only by the considerable and ongoing departure of craftsmen, but also by the very close link between Ticino and Lombardy and, more generally, Italy. The exhibition, which does not include only Ticinese artists, also documents the historiographical approaches and taste-based choices that, since the second half of the 19th century, have shaped the emergence and development – not always organic or coherent – of public collections in Italian-speaking Switzerland. Among the around one hundred works on display are, alongside a few masterpieces by the two leading figures of 17th-century Ticinese 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 is also showing for the first time an important work by the