Art from the 14th to the 19th century in Ticino’s public collections. An Overview

Expanding its horizons beyond the precious yet limited confines of its own collection, the Pinacoteca Cantonale Giovanni Züst presents an exhibition bringing together some of the most significant works from the period between the late Middle Ages and the second half of the 19th century held in Ticino's public collections.

The exhibition, which complements the Pinacoteca's works with loans from other institutions, offers a comprehensive overview of an artistic and historical heritage usually scattered across multiple locations and not always accessible to the public. Within the unified framework of a museum display, arranged chronologically through thematic and genre groupings, visitors have the opportunity to admire paintings and sculptures housed not only at the Pinacoteca Züst, but also at the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, the State Archives, the Casa Rusca Museum, the Vela Museum, the Mendrisio Art Museum, the Villa dei Cedri Museum, the Blenio Valley Historical and Ethnographic Museum, and several ecclesiastical buildings.

By enabling fruitful comparisons between often highly valuable artistic works, the exhibition showcases the richness of this heritage and simultaneously outlines a brief history of Ticino art over the centuries examined, highlighting its protagonists and key turning points. This history is characterized not only by the significant and prolonged emigration of artistic talent but also by the very close ties that bind Ticino to Lombardy and, more generally, Italy.

The exhibition, which includes more than just Ticino artists, also documents the historiographical approaches and tastes that characterized the emergence and development, not always organic and coherent, of public collections in Italian-speaking Switzerland from the second half of the 19th century. Nearly fifty years after the exhibition "Art Presences in Ticino from the 15th to the 18th Century," held at Villa Ciani in 1979, the exhibition presents a survey of the ancient art heritage held in Ticino's various museums. The aim is to foster shared reflection on the management and overall valorization of these collections, especially in light of the upcoming renovation and expansion of the Pinacoteca.

Around one hundred works are on display, including, in addition to some masterpieces by the two leading exponents of 17th-century Ticino painting, Giovanni Serodine and Pier Francesco Mola, paintings and sculptures by Bernardino Luini, Tommaso Rodari, Domenico Fetti, Joos de Momper, Giuseppe Antonio Petrini, Angelika Kauffmann, Carlo Bossoli, Vincenzo Vela, and Antonio Ciseri. For the exhibition, the Pinacoteca is also hosting for the first time an important work by the Master of the Blue Jeans, recently added to the collection thanks to the generosity of the Dr. Joseph Scholz Foundation, which for years has contributed to enriching the collections of major Swiss museums, including the Kunsthaus Zurich.

The painting Beggar Mother with Two Children, one of the most significant works by this still anonymous artist who has enjoyed growing critical attention in recent years, fits into the "reality painting" movement, popular throughout 17th-century Europe, which did not disdain the depiction of figures from the lower social classes, often dressed in rags and captured in their everyday lives. The painter owes his name to the presence, in many of his works, of that blue fustian fabric produced in Genoa that we now commonly call blue jeans. This autumn, the Pinacoteca will dedicate a major retrospective to one of the leading figures of 18th-century Lombard and Italian painting, the Ticino-born Giuseppe Antonio Petrini (1677-1759). More than thirty years after the exhibition presented in Lugano in 1991, the show will represent a unique opportunity to admire some of the Carona-born painter's greatest masterpieces brought together in one place.