As usual, thanks to the contribution of Assicurazioni Generali, the Palazzo Cini Gallery at San Vio will reopen to the public from spring to autumn. This elegant house-museum contains the most important
part of the historic art collection of Vittorio Cini, an entrepreneur, philanthropist and leading 20th-century Italian art collector. The gallery exhibits a fascinating legacy of paintings, sculptures and art objects that form a remarkable itinerary of Italian art from the 13th to the 18th century. Among the masterpieces on display that can now be admired again are the stunning series of paintings from the Florentine Renaissance, including works by Beato Angelico and Piero di Cosimo, and a group of paintings from Ferrara with works by Dosso Dossi, Cosmè Tura, Ercole de’ Roberti and other artists from the “Officina Ferrarese”, such as
Marco Zoppo, Baldassarre d’Este, Ludovico Mazzolino and Lorenzo Costa.

 

This year also sees the return of A Guest at the Palace. As in previous years, this involves bringing to the gallery masterpieces on loan from major Italian and international galleries with the aim of establishing visual relationships and affinities of content with the works in the Cini permanent collection. The chosen work this year is the celebrated painting of St George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello from the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. It will be on show in Venice as part of a reciprocal lending agreement in exchange for The Judgement of Paris by Botticelli and Workshop, which will leave the Palazzo Cini Gallery in September for the Paris exhibition Botticelli: un laboratoire de la Renaissance (10 September 2021–24 January 2022).

 

Palazzo Cini also hosts the extended Piranesi Rome Basilico exhibition, officially opened in 2020, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Fondazione Cini Institute of Art History, with the collaboration of the Gabriele Basilico Archive.

 

The Palazzo Cini  Gallery, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Palazzo Grassi-Punta della Dogana form what is called the “Dorsoduro Museum Mile”, an amazing cultural circuit with integrated itineraries, shared communications and discounted museum entrance tickets. Created in 2015, the Dorsoduro Museum Mile welcomes visitors on a walk just over a mile long through the Dorsoduro district, between the Grand Canal and the Canale della Giudecca, providing the opportunity to admire eight centuries of world art history: from the masterpieces of Mediaeval and Renaissance Venetian painting in the Gallerie dell’Accademia to the protagonists of the contemporary art scene on display at Punta della Dogana, via the historic house-museums of Vittorio Cini and Peggy Guggenheim and the collections put together by the two great art patrons