At Palazzo Grassi CHRONORAMA. Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century, is a collection of photographs from the Condé Nast archives which have recently been acquired by Palazzo Grassi’s parent company Pinault Collection. Curator Matthieu Humery spent much time perusing the immense archives – Condé Nast is the publisher of “Vogue”, “The New Yorker”, “GQ, Glamour”, “Architectural Digest”, “Vanity Fair”, and “Wired”, among others – to eventually select four hundred iconic images that will bring the twentieth century back to life before our eyes. Events, social trends, personalities, evolution in taste and aesthetics… anything that earned a place in history, plus, obviously, the art and technique of photography itself as a language of mass communication. These portraits (not selfies), and features (not stories) have been created by some of the greatest talents of their generation, from the 1910s to the early 1980s. It all started in 1909, when the young and ambitious publisher Condé Montrose Nast bought a niche socialites’ weekly named “Vogue”, once founded by Arthur Baldwin Turnure in 1892 and semi-abandoned after Turnure’s death. Soon enough, Nast turned Vogue into a magazine for the elite – or aspiring to be. As history would have it, Vogue would become the most famous and influential fashion magazine in the world.