The Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca' d'Oro, thanks to the extraordinary synergy between the National Museums of Perugia - Regional Directorate of Umbria Museums and the Regional Directorate of Veneto Museums, will host from 17 April to 16 June 2024 some masterpieces of the National Gallery of Umbria in a comparison with important works by Italian masters of the second half of the twentieth century.

The works of Duccio di Boninsegna , Gentile da Fabriano , the Master of the Madonna of Perugia , Giovanni Baronzio , Cataluccio da Todi and Bartolomeo Caporali alongside artists close to us such as Alberto Burri , Gino De Dominicis , Lucio Fontana , Marisa Merz , Michelangelo Pistoletto and Carol Rama will build an absolutely unique path, through six dialogues between ancient and modern which, in the name of the use of gold, will see works side by side which, due to technical, aesthetic and conceptual similarities, propose new comparisons, suggestions and perspectives, opening up previously unpublished horizons of interpretation.

Each combination, through in-depth analysis based on types of artefact, tools and processing methods in their continuity or discontinuity over time or on the symbolic meanings of a material that has marked millennia of history of thought in the figure, will investigate the hidden meaning of one of the most mysterious and profound aspects of art.

The presence of gold in a work of art is never a pure formal solution, but belongs to a more complex sphere which inevitably refers to the sacred figuration, to the gold background of the icon, to a transcendent space. A choice which, beyond any decorative effect, after its debut in the Middle Ages returns with a different sign, but the same intensity, even in the works of contemporary artists, well aware of the eternal symbolic power of this exceptional material.

In proposing this encounter that overcomes the distances of space and time, the exhibition aims to restore to the reading of contemporary works that strength that comes from tradition and memory, and at the same time invites us to reread in the masterpieces that come to us from the 14th and 15th centuries the their perennial relevance which has allowed art, both past and present, to place itself on the border between the visible of the image and the invisible of its power as a symbol.