, subject to availability.
The lecture, introduced by the director of the Ragghianti Foundation Paolo Bolpagni, will examine the lively and complex panorama of collecting in eighteenth-century Venice , especially that linked to the flourishing of the Grand Tour tourist market and the transfer of works of art to the great European courts, especially the English one, for which the British banker and diplomat Joseph Smith (1674-1770) played a fundamental role, having been the most important patron of the arts in Venice at the time, as well as consul in the city from 1744 to 1760.
His intense activity as a collector of manuscripts, books, drawings, paintings, medals, engraved gems, and coins was accompanied by his commercial activity, and the two aspects often coincided and merged, so much so as to alarm the Venetian collector and antiquarian Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo (1680-1767). The latter, in fact, had not initially realized that with his first commissions of works from Venetian painters, including Sebastiano and Marco Ricci , Rosalba Carriera , Antonio Visentini , and Canaletto (all friends of Zanetti), the astute Englishman had already begun to build his own collection of 18th-century Venetian art, the most important in the world, now the pride of the British Royal Collection.
Born in Warsaw, Bożena Anna Kowalczyk is a leading scholar of Canaletto and 18th-century Venetian landscape painting. She is the author of numerous essays published in international journals, and the curator of exhibitions dedicated to veduta painting, starting with “Bernardo Bellotto 1722–1780” (Venice, Museo Correr, 2001), “Canaletto in the Early Manner” (Venice, Fondazione Cini, 2001), “Canaletto: The Triumph of the View” (Rome, Palazzo Giustiniani, 2005), and “Canaletto and Bellotto: The Art of the View” (Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio, 2008). Between 2010 and 2015 he collaborated with Culterespaces for the creation of two exhibitions, "Canaletto et Guardi. Les deux maîtres de Venise" (Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, 2012-2013) and "Canaletto. Rome, Londres, Venise. Le triomphe de la lumière" (Aix-en-Provence, Hôtel de Caumont, 2015). More recently he curated two major retrospectives, “Bellotto and Canaletto. Wonder and Light” and “Canaletto 1697-1768”, organized at the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan in 2016-2017 and in Rome at Palazzo Braschi in 2018. Another important curatorial work of his is the exhibition “Bernardo Bellotto 1740. Journey to Tuscany”, presented in 2019-2020 at the Ragghianti Foundation .
Licia and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti Art Study Center Foundation - E
Monumental complex of San Micheletto
Email: info@fondazioneragghianti.it
Tel.: 0583 467205