Nino Barbantini was the first director of the Modern Art Gallery at Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. The museum was established with a dowry of 241 pieces in 1923. Today, we celebrate the event with The Nineteenth-Century Venetian Portrait, the Museum’s upcoming exhibition and a compendium of the faces and clothes of notable Venetians at the times of Neo-classicism and Romanticism. The Museum’s collection has been integrated with pieces from public and private collections, some thought to be lost forever, some presented under new light, some only recently attributed to what were formerly anonymous artists. The immobility, or algid, authoritative expression of these portraits and the gestures on these people knowingly elaborates on the idealization of established canons into a more intimate form of realism, both bourgeois and aristocratic. Each artist contributed their interpretations of looks and stories, though how much of those survived one hundred years? As it is often the case, some things are lost, while some other resurface…
Featured Image: Francesco Hayez, Matilde Pirovano Visconti, Private Collection
