From 28 November to 7 April 2024
On the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of the Barolo Social District, in the Discovery Space of the Sabauda Gallery, the Royal Museums inaugurate the Giulia & Tancredi Falletti dossier exhibition of Barolo collectors. The exhibition, curated by the Royal Museums in collaboration with the Opera Barolo, celebrates the marquises Giulia and Carlo Tancredi Falletti of Barolo , leading figures of 19th century Piedmontese society, illustrating their collecting taste, commissions and cultural interests, reconstructing the original nucleus of their collection through a selection from the 45 works of ancient art donated in 1864 with a bequest to the Regia Pinacoteca, now Galleria Sabauda, exhibited in dialogue with paintings and sculptures once part of the same collection.
In early nineteenth-century Turin, the Marquises Falletti of Barolo were very active in the welfare field, showing a constant commitment to the poor classes. In particular, after having reformed the women's prisons in Turin, on 7 March 1823 Giulia Colbert founded the Refuge, one of the first institutions to welcome and educate the so-called "unsafe women"; in the following years, the marquises expanded the first structure to create a complex of institutes united in a sort of citadel of human promotion, capable of supporting especially girls and women in difficulty.
The dossier exhibition traces the cultural interests of the two nobles through their contemporary painting and sculpture and their collecting choices , the result of a refined eclectic taste, oriented towards the most significant things the antiques market offered; the story of their travels in Italy, discovering the monuments of classical antiquity and the works of the great Italian masters of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century; their love for art, understood as a tool for education in the values of Catholic morality, growth and social redemption.
The exhibition itinerary opens with the section dedicated to contemporary artistic production, in particular the neoclassical plastic linked to the aesthetic theories of Bertel Thorvaldsen. Among the masterpieces is the Herm of Sappho , a famous marble sculpture commissioned to Antonio Canova in 1819-1820 by the Marquis Tancredi, donated by his will to the City of Turin and today preserved at the GAM - Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Works such as the Girl with the Turtle Doves and the Praying Child by the sculptor Luigi Pampaloni with Jesus and the children are on display, a canvas commissioned from Pietro Ayres , a painter also active for the Savoy court as a portraitist, preserved in Turin in the Palazzo Falletti in Barolo; there are two drawings made by Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti , on loan from the GAM of Turin, two paintings by the Turin-born Pietro Righini , as well as the canvas depicting Guglielmo Falletti of Barolo and Louis XI of France , the work of Giovanni Migliara . The section is completed with two refined pastel portraits of Giulia and Carlo Tancredi , painted in 1812 by Luigi Bernero (Turin, Palazzo Falletti di Barolo), which show clear contacts with the French portraiture of Jacques-Louis David.
Piazzetta Reale, 1, Turin, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
wednesday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
thursday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
friday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
saturday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
sunday | 09:00 - 19:00 | 18:00 |
Info and reservations: [email protected] / Tickets online