From 11 March, the permanent collection of Ca' Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna will be enriched with a fundamental nucleus of drawings by Mario Sironi, which came to Ca' Pesaro thanks to the Sironi-Straußwald donation. The Sironi-Straußwald Donation offers, exhibited to the public for the most part for the first time, after careful conservation and assembly work, the precious drawings related to the mural work that Sironi created in 1936-37 in the Aula Magna of the University of Venezia a Ca' Foscari , entitled Venezia, l'Italia e gli Studi, the only excellent example of Sironi's great season of mural painting in the lagoon city. Alongside the drawings, Sironi's masterpieces, already part of the Ca' Pesaro museum collections, are also on display.

Around the 1930s, Mario Sironi devoted himself almost entirely to monumental works. The fresco Venice, Italy and Studies in the Aula Magna (today Aula Baratto) of Ca' Foscari, is a significant example of this, although today it is obscured and not very legible after the damage deriving largely from a fire in the 1979. The mural work presents, from the left, the figure of the fascist university student with book and musket, a female figure leaning on a bundle which, due to the presence of the cogwheels, has been identified with the Technique, another figure female near a caduceus, probable personification of Medicine, the seated figure of Venice with a table representing Ca' Foscari, the Basilica of San Marco with the lion walking, and finally the representation of Italy holding a broken chain. Numerous other elements and inscriptions complete the iconography. “Among the authors favored by the art critic Margherita Sarfatti and at the center of the artistic renewal that developed with the Italian Novecento group, towards the 1930s Sironi identified - recalls Elisabetta Barisoni, Manager of Ca' Pesaro - mural art as a new challenge for the creativity and prestige of Italian production. Addressed not only as a technical issue, muralism is Sironi's renewed way to recall the soul and sense of antiquity and make art a public thing, distinguished by collective fruition, monumental elements and eternal themes".

“A great example of Sironi's mural season, L'Italia, Venezia e gli Studi per Ca' Foscari emerges from the precious papers of the Sironi-Straußwald donation, which constitute a corpus of quality and fundamental importance for appreciating the artist's creative process and the his ability as a skilled draftsman. The sketches, sketches, compositions and individual figures offer a unique opportunity for reflection, not only for the dialogue they open with the other works by Sironi conserved in the Museum but also for their intimate link with Venetian visual history". says the President of the MUVE Foundation , Mariacristina Gribaudi . “Ca' Pesaro is the recipient of important bequests. Those presented here are proof of this. They confirm not only the prestige of this Institution and of our Museums but also their ability to enhance the legacies, both through exhibitions, such as these, dedicated to them, and through the placing on a Venetian but also international circuit of the works that have been there entrusted”, says the Mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro .