We The Italians | Italian art: Carpi reopens its museums

Italian art: Carpi reopens its museums

Italian art: Carpi reopens its museums

  • WTI Magazine #130 Aug 22, 2020
  • 1234

Last spring, the Palazzo dei Pio in Carpi, in Emilia Romagna presented the new Pinacoteca di Carpi, the result of restoration and rearrangement work in the so-called Stanze del Vescovo (Bishop's Rooms), located in the building that connects the central Renaissance portion of the Palazzo with the 15th century Torrione degli Spagnoli. For this important event, the museum has planned the exhibition Rare Pitture. From Guercino to Mattia Preti to Palma il Giovane, which will have precisely the function of narrating the future Pinacoteca.

The exhibition presents a selection of about one hundred paintings and drawings from the deposits of the museums of Carpi. To open the exhibition some large canvases, exemplifying the Emilian painting of the late sixteenth-seventeenth century, all from churches in the area and local collections, flanked by masterpieces such as The Baptism of Christ by Denijs Calvaert, The allegory of Vice and Virtue of Palma il Giovane and The Revenge of Progne by Mattia Preti.

The exhibition continues with the section entitled Copie da... la grande pittura del Cinque-Seicento a Carpi (Copies from... the great painting of the 16th-17th century in Carpi), which proposes contemporary copies of great quality of the most famous works of the Bolognese school painters, from Guercino to Carracci, but also of Correggio and Giorgione. To these is added a nucleus of works of considerable value from private collections, Roman or Tuscan.

The future Pinacoteca di Carpi will be developed through two parallel itineraries, along the five rooms of the Stanze del Vescovo and two rooms conceived as a deposit accessible to the public. The first part of the new itinerary, presented and reinterpreted by the exhibition Rare Pitture, will find space in the Renaissance loggias of the Palazzo dei Pio and in the Manuzio room, each one conceived as an autonomous space, but connected to the other, as a chapter of a single story.

Last May on the occasion of the exhibition also reopened the Museum of Sacred Art "Cardinal Rodolfo Pio of Savoy" of the diocese of Carpi. The museum is located in the church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Carpi, whose construction dates back to 1670 with a project by Antonio Loraghi and underwent restoration and seismic improvement following the earthquake of 2012. It is a treasure chest that collects five hundred years of the artistic and cultural history of the territory. Among the many works that will be presented in the exhibition of the Museum stands out the diptych of the Ferrara Ippolito Scarsella called "lo Scarsellino" (schoolboy of Paolo Veronese) depicting the Madonna Annunciata and the Announcing Angel, which was originally a single canvas placed on the altar of the Annunciation, in the Collegiate Church of Mirandola.

The exhibition ends at Palazzo Foresti where the works of mythological and profane subjects that complete this path in the artistic production of the Carpi area between the 15th and 19th centuries are housed.