Agenda

The image of eighteenth-century Venetian prints is mainly shaped by vedutas of the city on the lagoon and enigmatic cycles of engravings imbued with artistic imagination. This exhibition focuses on Anton Maria Zanetti (1680-1767), art collector, connoisseur, publisher and wood-engraver, in the midst of illustrious names such as Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, Marco Ricci and Canaletto.
Zanetti devoted his life to art, especially to drawing and printmaking. He actively encouraged many artists in his circle, most notably including Marco Ricci and Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, to adopt engraving and work on new cycles of prints. He concentrated his attention on the older, sixteenth-century technique of coloured woodcuts, with which he reproduced his collection of drawings by Parmigianino, introducing them to connoisseurs throughout Europe. The exhibition presents the famous views of Venice and the equally fascinating Scherzi, Capricci and Grotteschi by Giambattista Tiepolo and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In doing so, it seeks to highlight, for the first time, the significant role played by Zanetti within the context of eighteenth century Venetian printmaking.

The exhibition focuses on the earliest days of photography taking as its starting point around 150 photographs from the Marco Antonetto Collection (around 1850) . The so-called veduta painting, a detailed painting of print of a city landscape, was the examples for the earliest photographers. The exhibition illustrates the different manners in which Rome was viewed prompted by scientific research, artistic passion or professional and commercial demands. The selection displays the specificity of the earliest aspects of photography in Rome, from the first experiments with the Albumin technique, daguerreotypes, Helium- and Collodium and paper negatives, to the birth of professional photographic studios and the creation of the most popular and successful sets of images on the international market. The archaeological and historical value of these early photography is immense and the architecture and urban landscape of the ancient Roman city and the later Papal state can be viewed without the megalomaniac building activities of Mussolini after 1922.

The exhibition in Basel is hosting key works from Old Masters. On show are works by Konrad Witz dating back to the first half of the fifteenth century, by Holbein’s father, Hans the Elder, famous for his portraits and altarpieces, by his son (Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb and Artist’s Family), by the “Crucifixion of Mathias Grünewald”, by sacred and profane paintings by Hans Baldung Grien and by Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Judgement of Paris”. The prominent role Swiss artists played in the emergence of the Renaissance is borne out by the Bernese painter Niklaus Manuel Deutsch and Tobias Stimmer.

Two decades of research have uncovered the vestiges of the vast antique estate in Orbe-Boscéaz, Switzerland. The place was initially known for its mosaics, but the recent discovery includes hundred rooms arranged around two peristyles: a monumental palatial building dating back to the 2nd and 3rd century, complete with all its annexes and protected by a surrounding wall measuring 400 metres by 400 metres. The new exhibition presents the mosaics with all information related to their discovery, the building of the house, the painted décor, the way of life of its inhabitants, the neighbouring Mythraeum. There is also a film showing the archaeologists’ work, complete with images of the villa in all its splendour.