Palazzo del Monferrato in Alessandria will host a new major exhibition entitled Precious Alessandria from 21 March 2024. An international laboratory at the end of the sixteenth century.

After the success of the sculptured Alessandria exhibition in 2019, dedicated to the artistic context in the city between Gothic and Renaissance, this exhibition, which always has the city of Alessandria and its territory at its centre, recounts its creative civilization between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing in particular on the sumptuary arts, close to the advent of international Mannerism in the years of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

A unique project that is part of the "Diffuse Uffizi" program, which will see loans from the Florentine Gallery and some of the most important Italian museums converge in Alessandria. Precious Alexandria. An international laboratory at the end of the sixteenth century is the new exhibition that will be held at Palazzo del Monferrato in Alessandria, curated by Fulvio Cervini and organized by Roberto Livraghi, Director of Palazzo Monferrato.

The exhibition is promoted by the Chamber of Commerce of Alessandria-Asti, the Piedmont Region, the Cassa di Risparmio di Alessandria Foundation, the Municipality of Alessandria, the Council for the valorisation of the artistic assets of Alessandria, the Council of Turin, in collaboration with the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Alessandria, Asti and Cuneo, the Slala Foundation and the ATL Alexala. Precious Alessandria is divided into seven sections made up of around eighty works, in which the protagonists are sculptures in precious metal, highlighting the decisive role played by the sumptuary arts, from goldsmithing to toreutics, from the art of armor making to the carving of semi-precious stones. The objective of the exhibition is twofold: on the one hand to outline the advent of international mannerism, the harbinger of a new sense of reality and form, through a selection of goldsmithery and metal objects, but also paintings on canvas and panel and wooden sculptures and marble which better communicate with the precious arts; the second focus of the project is to show and demonstrate how the current territory of the province of Alessandria was a place of convergence of different forces and cultures, which did not disfigure in comparison with other more glorious cities in the Po Valley, but rather represented a happy exception, in whose Nordic influences competed with those coming from Florence and Rome.