Farewell to art historian Augusta Monferini Calvesi

Art historian Augusta Monferini Calvesi, wife of art historian Maurizio Calvesi who died in 2020, passed away yesterday in Rome after a long illness.

Born in Ancona in 1934, Augusta Monferini Calvesi made important studies onmedieval art and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A functionary of the Neapolitan and Roman Superintendencies, she was director of the Spada Gallery, but her strongest contribution was to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, of which she was a longtime director in the 1980s and 1990s. She gave the museum a fundamental renewal impetus and expanded the collections with works by Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh, and by artists of twentieth-century Italian art such as Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Renato Guttuso, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Pietro Consagra, Umberto Mastroianni, Giulio Turcato, Fabrizio Clerici and many others. The acquisitions of these important nuclei of works have been complemented by the creation of major exhibitions both at the Roman museum’s headquarters and abroad. It has also promoted exhibitions dedicated to Turcato, Guttuso, de Chirico, Pistoletto, Paolini, de Pisis, Sironi, and Carrà.

For the past two decades, together with her husband, Augusta Monferini Calvesi was editor and coordinator of the scholarly journal Storia dell’Arte, saving it from closure and generously funding it.

The funeral will be held on Monday, June 13, at 12 noon in the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Farewell to art historian Augusta Monferini Calvesi

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