Brescia Diocesan Museum, here are the exhibitions for the Italian capital cities of culture

From the exhibition on the sacred production of Giacomo Ceruti to the new display of Franca Ghitti’sLast Supper, from the unprecedented comparison between the Russian icons owned by the Museum and the works of Sonia Costantini, to the Focus inclusivity that will offer the solo exhibition of the blind sculptor Felice Tagliaferri and a path in the dark among the Diocesan’s works. These are some of the initiatives that the Diocesan Museum of Brescia has studied on the occasion of 2023, a special year for Brescia that, with Bergamo, will share the role of Italian capital of culture.

A program with the aim of enhancing the artistic, cultural, religious, and spiritual heritage of the city, as well as publicizing and bringing prestige to its collections. The 2023 Brescia Diocesan Museum will be preceded in December 2022 by two proposals. The first is scheduled for Dec. 12, when an exhibition will open that, until Jan. 15, presents two works of ancient art from the collection of Bper Banca, created by artists from Bergamo and Brescia: the Annunciation by Giovan Battista Moroni, who trained in the workshop of Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto (c. 1498 - 1554), and the Crucifixion by Girolamo da Romano, known as Romanino (c. 1484 - c. 1566).

The second, on December 20 with the opening from the new location of the Last Supper created in 2010 by Brescian artist Franca Ghitti (Erbanno, BS, 1932 - Brescia 2012). It is a large-scale work in which sculpture is intertwined with painting, echoing a 1963 painting in which Franca Ghitti had depicted the Last Supper, reworked in light of her latest spatial research. The installation sees on the ground, on a long page of black paper, three rows of iron cups containing a handful of seeds, alternating with two round loaves of bread and twelve spoons, the symbol of the twelve apostles. Welcoming it to the Diocesan Museum will be the room in front of the monumental refectory, thus going into dialogue with its seventeenth-century fresco depicting precisely a Last Supper and allowing visitors to admire it from every angle.

Among the planned initiatives, particularly interesting is the Focus inclusiveness, a project with a strong social impact, in collaboration with the UICI (Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired), which will revolve around the solo exhibition of the blind sculptor, Felice Tagliaferri, scheduled from January 12 to June 25, 2023. The Cesena-based artist stands out in the contemporary Italian and international scene for the expressive power of his figurative works created in marble, through tactile manipulation of the material, with iconographies related to the religious world and descriptive of human frailty. The sculptor’s hands translate into marble what the eyes do not see, giving the works - usually life-size or slightly smaller - such a precise rendering of the real datum that the only way to internalize and understand them is precisely through the tactile experience. At the Diocesan Museum of Brescia, Tagliaferri will propose: the Cristo riVelato (2010), modeled after Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Cristo Velato, preserved in the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, one of Italy’s 18th-century sculptural masterpieces; the Pieta ribaltata (2020) inspired by the Pieta by Michelangelo in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, where it is the son holding his exhausted mother in his arms, and the Holy Family with Fragile Child (2021), which sees the revisiting of the subject with the presence of a child of about 7 years old, suffering from Down Syndrome.

Parallel to the exhibition there will be actions designed to make the museum context a new space dedicated to welcome and inclusiveness. Felice Tagliaferri’s exhibition will inaugurate the Percorso al Buio (Pathway in the Dark ), permanently set up and created in collaboration with architect Roberto Bertoli, together with UICI and Arte con Noi, with installations dedicated to blind people and the creation of an immersive room in the dark, for an amplified and all-embracing sensory experience for all. Within the museum itinerary, one or two particularly relevant works will also be selected for each section, which will be reproduced in various materials, accompanied by typhlological aids and explanations in Braille, to be enjoyed tactilely by both visually impaired and sighted people. A reproduction of the St. Joseph’s Convent complex will be placed at the entrance to the museum with tactile maps that will enable geolocation of the building in the city’s urban context. The creation of the tactile tables will begin already by the end of the year thanks to the proceeds of the event COSE MAI VISTE, the handmade crafts and creative recycling market, which will be held on Saturday, Nov. 19 and Sunday, Nov. 20, with the presence of some 50 exhibitors.

The plastic language will also be explored through two solo shows dedicated in the spring to Fabio Tavelli, aka SIKU, who creates works in marble so fine that they become almost transparent, and in the summer to Rita Siragusa, who through bronze, terracotta and other materials, proposes to create a link between man and God, past and future to illuminate the actuality of Christian hope.

From January 16 to March 26, 2023, the exhibition Inhabiting Eternity will be held. Sonia Costantini and the Sacred Icon. The exhibition, curated by Alberto Cividati, professor of philosophy at the Cesare Arici Institute, will compare the rich collection of icons of Russian provenance, made between the 17th and 20th centuries, of the Diocesan Museum of Brescia with the monochrome painting of Sonia Costantini (Mantua, 1953), relating the two modes of “absolute painting”: the fragmentation of the icon and the monochrome as icon. The icons and paintings will be placed in front of each other, revealing the continuity and discontinuity of their becoming an experience of the sacred.

Another exhibition event is scheduled from March 11 to May 21, 2023. It is the exhibition Ceruti sacred and painting in Brescia between Ricci and Tiepolo, curated by Angelo Loda, head of the historical-artistic sector of the ABAP Superintendence for the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia, assisted by a scientific committee composed of Andrea Crescini, Fiorenzo Fisogni, Fiorella Frisoni, Stefano L’Occaso, Francesco Nezosi and Filippo Piazza, which will analyze the limited production of sacred works created by Giacomo Ceruti during his stay in the province of Brescia and other later works, and will enrich the exhibition itinerary of the show dedicated to the 18th-century master, scheduled from Feb. 14 to May 28, 2023, at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. Giacomo Ceruti’s sacred production has been the subject in recent decades of progressive critical studies that have increasingly circumscribed its breadth and objective limits, remaining in fact a sort of appendix to his better-known and more celebrated activity as a portraitist and painter of genre scenes. In recent years, the name of Ceruti has been juxtaposed with more works of very dubious quality and difficult to relate to his work, creating a certain confusion of attribution that it is necessary to unravel. The object of the exhibition will therefore be to present the production of a religious character of the Milanese artist in its entirety as far as the works preserved in the province of Brescia are concerned, which will be flanked by a selection of paintings he executed after his stay in the city, between Padua, Piacenza and Crema. The exhibition will be introduced by a selection of sacred paintings by the main artists active in the Brescia and Bergamo area in the early eighteenth century, including Sebastiano Ricci, Giovambattista Tiepolo, Andrea Celesti, Antonio Cifrondi, and Francesco Paglia, and will conclude with a selection of works by artists active between the 1920s and 1940s such as Giuseppe Tortelli, Antonio and Angelo Paglia, and Francesco Monti. The parish church of Gandino (BG), which preserves an almost unique set of evidence of Cerutian art, will become a sort of second venue for the exhibition.

In the second part of the year, the Diocesan Museum of Brescia will host the Equilibristi project, which will present the works of three artists such as Stefano Bombardieri, Alessandro Montanari and Cinzia Bevilacqua, who have decided to collaborate with each other and combine the strength of their languages - sculpture, photography, painting - to create an exhibition in which to narrate the unstable balance that often characterizes human existence, especially after the experience of the pandemic. The exhibition, curated by Anna Lisa Ghirardi and Valentina Pedrali, will be built along three sections dedicated to each artist. Stefano Bombardieri will propose Balancing in the past, a new cycle of works dedicated to the difficult search for balance that human beings make in the journey of their lives; Alessandro Montanari, with Il giro del palazzo, a series of black and white photographs taken during the first wave of the pandemic; and Cinzia Bevilacqua, with Appartenere al quotidiano, a gallery of still lifes and portraits of ordinary people and famous personalities, linked by a common feeling, that is, by the same emotions, enthusiasms and uncertainties, worries and hopes.

Among the various initiatives supported by the Diocesan Museum of Brescia is Custodi della bellezza (Keepers of Beauty), a project involving 25 specially trained young graduates who will welcome and lead visitors to discover the treasures hidden inside the sacred buildings of Brescia and its province, in a tour that includes churches in the historic center of Brescia and Santa Maria della Neve in Pisogne. Keepers of Beauty is promoted and organized by Brescia Cathedral Parish, in collaboration with the Brescia Historic Center Pastoral Unit, the Brescia Federation of Oratories, the Brescia Diocesan Museum, the network parishes, Brescia Catholic University, LABA and the SantaGiulia Academy of Fine Arts.

The statements

“Also in the 2023 programming,” says President Nicoletta Bontempi, “the Diocesan Museum of Brescia offers itself as a container of the culture of the Sacred as service, proposal, gift and encounter. We want to feel more and more an active part of the cultural and artistic process of our city and our territory through the idea of a Museum that also goes out of its rooms and lives in the context. The year 2023 will allow us to make people discover or rediscover our essence with a program that will revolve around art, welcome and inclusion fueled by the presence of exhibitions, meetings and experiential itineraries.”

“The Diocese of Brescia,” continues Don Giuseppe Mensi, Episcopal Vicar for Administration and Director of the Cultural Heritage Office of the Diocese of Brescia, “has always supported with particular attention the activities of the Diocesan Museum: this commitment will only continue and intensify in 2023. In this year in which particular importance will be given to all cultural events and first and foremost to art, together with the Diocese of Bergamo we will carry out a real focus on ”hidden treasures,“ meaning by this term both the splendid works of art that are not always known and appreciated, and the enhancement and support of the many young people who can put their preparation and enthusiasm to good use. Significant in this regard will be the path of inclusion that will lead the Diocesan Museum to be accessible to people with low vision or other disabilities.”

“Growing Together is a title, a wish but above all a modus that with Italian Capital of Culture we really want to make concrete and firm.” Thus the Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture of Brescia, Laura Castelletti, who emphasizes, “And it is not only about the collaboration between the two cities that share the title but also and above all about the synergy within the dense and lively network of cultural institutions of each city. I believe that Brescia, on this front, has made considerable progress in recent years, which the occasion of 2023 has made even more incisive. A clear and valuable example of this is the program of initiatives of the Diocesan Museum that is being presented today. A palimpsest that, while keeping its heritage and identity at the center, is based on the participation of many actors, that speaks to different audiences, and that connects different places. A richness that can only be appreciated by the public and leave important seeds for the years to follow as well.”

“From December 2022 to December 2023, the Diocesan Museum of Brescia,” closes Diocesan Museum director Mauro Salvatore, “has put together an intense program that will lead it to network with public bodies, academic, museum, cultural, educational and artistic institutions, grant-making foundations, banking and financial institutions and businesses, to weave ongoing relationships with art historians, university and school teachers, contemporary artists and to work structurally with young people, investing in them and benefiting from their vision.”

Hours: daily, except Wednesday, 10 a.m.-12 p.m.; 3 p.m.-6 p.m.

Admission to Museum collections and exhibitions: full price: € 6.00; concessions: € 3.00

Information: tel. 030.40233; museo@diocesi.brescia.it; www.museodiocesano.brescia.it

Image: Giacomo Ceruti, Saint Apollonius blesses Saints Faustino and Giovita (Bione, Church of Saints Faustino and Giovita). Photo by BAMS Photo Rodella

Brescia Diocesan Museum, here are the exhibitions for the Italian capital cities of culture

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