The Salce Collection National Museum, in collaboration with Punti di Vista, is organizing the Arte del Seeing exhibition from Saturday 18 May to Sunday 6 October 2024. Posters and glasses from the Salce and Stramare Collections, curated by Elisabetta Pasqualin and Michele Vello, with the collaboration of Mariachiara Mazzariol. The exhibition, set up in the former church of Santa Margherita, in Treviso, explores the world of eyewear through two levels of interpretation: representation, through advertising posters from the Salce collection, and form, thanks to the historic glasses from the Stramare collection.

Art of Seeing is an ideal dialogue between two collectors and their passions. The polychrome paper visions of Ferdinando Salce's posters, alongside the thousand variations of the round glasses of Lucio Stramare. And it is also the first time that the Salce Museum places its priceless graphic heritage as a complement to design, in a continuum of representations of shapes ranging from the sixteenth century to the fifties of the twentieth century. The visitor can enjoy comparing the glasses with their depiction, which becomes abstract or punctual depending on the hand of the illustrator and the style of each era. The glasses of the posters, rarely and late the object of direct advertising, become protagonists, as a functional ornament: they underline expressions, sharpen gestures and enhance the social status of those who wear them.

The choice to set up this exhibition in Treviso is not accidental. A thin thread links the city to the glasses, specifically in their representation. In 1352 Tomaso da Modena, already the author of the stories of Sant'Orsola once in Santa Margherita, frescoed the Dominican Chapter Room in the convent of San Nicolò. In the long series of prelates, one in particular catches our gaze, because he is wearing a pair of glasses: the oldest iconographic testimony of this object, which the Salce Museum intends to celebrate with an exhibition that combines illustration with design, where everything “visually” began. For the occasion - in collaboration with Chiese Aperte Treviso - the Chapter Room will be open to visitors on Saturday 18 May, the opening day of the exhibition, from 1pm to 6.30pm (entry from the Seminary reception).