What did the Medici, the Rothschilds and J.P. Morgan have in frequent? They have been all bankers who cast huge creative legacies. They’re additionally a few of the stars of a sweeping present spotlighting main financiers and their artwork. Going down on the Milan department of the Gallerie d’Italia, the present explores the monetary world’s function in producing artwork, and artwork’s function in consolidating bankers’ social standing. It’s a grand investigation into how, within the phrases of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, financial capital transforms into cultural and symbolic capital.
The exhibition covers a 500-year span—from the Medici to the Rothschilds—and a territorial sweep stretching from Europe to the US. Eleven sections, every devoted to a person banker, include 120 work, sculptures, drawings, engravings and bronzes by artists together with Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Anthony van Dyck, Angelica Kauffman and Giorgio Morandi. They embody loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Nationwide Gallery in London, the Albertina in Vienna, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
“Bankers are among the many most quite a few social classes of collectors on the planet,” says the co-curator Fernando Mazzocca. “Now we have tried to indicate their particular person tastes by way of the works they acquired and commissioned. What emerges is a way of the refinedness of every collector.”
Caravaggio’s St. Jerome (round 1605-06) Montserrat, Museu de Montserrat
Effectively-known patrons featured embody Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the highly effective grand dukes of Tuscany who funnelled monumental quantities of cash into the Florentine Renaissance, and Agostino Chigi, the Sienese financier of popes for whom Raphael frescoed the Villa Farnesina in Rome. Guests will be taught that the Torlonia household, famed immediately for proudly owning the biggest assortment of historic sculptures at present in personal arms, additionally commissioned artwork, as clear from Per un de’ piedi il furibondo Alcide afferra e scaglia Lica (1812)—“probably [Antonio] Canova’s best work”, Mazzocca says.
The exhibition additionally explores what motivated the patrons. Some, like Lorenzo de’ Medici—whose portraits and busts by the likes of Pietro Torrigiano and Bronzino are included within the present—sought private glory. Others aimed to counterpoint society by way of artwork. Andrew Mellon, the US banking empire inheritor, began constructing the West Constructing of the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, DC in 1937; following his loss of life, his son donated round 1,000 work—together with works by Raphael, Titian and Claude Monet—to the museum.
An accompanying catalogue contains in-depth essays assessing every banker’s legacy and detailed notes on the works. The most important discoveries relate to the extra obscure personalities, Mazzocca says. Everhard Jabach acquired collections from the Ludovisi in Rome and England’s King Charles I. Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, whose 262 works constituted the most important personal assortment of latest works in Prussia, shaped the premise of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta (1946) © Giorgio Morandi by SIAE 2022; © Federico Manusardi
The present’s venue, within the lavishly embellished headquarters of the previous Banca Commerciale Italiana (Comit), is symbolically important. The area now serves as one in every of 4 Italian museums within the Gallerie d’Italia community, created by the Intesa Sanpaolo financial institution to show its personal artwork assortment. “With its museums, Intesa operates the type of cultural strategy we discover by way of this exhibition,” Mazzocca says.
The exhibition closes with a piece devoted to Raffaele Mattioli, the so-called “humanist banker”, who performed a number one function in orchestrating Italy’s post-war financial and cultural revival. Mattioli battled to protect the nation’s creative heritage, shopping for Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà (1564) for town of Milan, to keep away from its expatriation to the US, and beginning the artwork assortment of the Comit financial institution, which he directed. He additionally actively supported established artists similar to Renato Guttuso and Morandi, by commissioning and shopping for their works each privately and thru the financial institution.
When Comit fused with different banks within the late Nineties to type the present Intesa Sanpaolo, its artwork assortment turned the premise of what’s now displayed within the Gallerie d’Italia. The hyperlink between the museums and Mattioli is embodied in Morandi’s Nonetheless Life (1946), commissioned by the banker, which is being exhibited in public for the primary time and closes the present. “This exhibition has been a uncommon alternative to review Mattioli,” Mazzocca says. “No person had realised fairly how a lot he had achieved for artwork.”
• Patrons, Collectors, Philanthropists: from the Medici to the Rothschilds, Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, till 26 March 2023
