Palazzo San Giorgio Reborn with the Casamonti Collection
Just days after the opening of the new exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, another major event joins Florence’s already extraordinary cultural offering: the opening of the Collezione Casamonti (the Casamonti Collection), the city’s new home for modern and contemporary art.
On the stretch of the Lungarno Serristori right opposite the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence’s National Library, an important historic building – Palazzo San Giorgio – has been completely restored and handed back to the city, in all its 19th-century pride, after years of neglect. It is a major work of architectural recovery signed by the studio Archea Associati; today the building houses the vast art collection that the Florentine gallerist Roberto Casamonti has put together over the years through the relationships he built with artists, critics and cultural institutions around the world, with meticulous passion and a great, innate intuition.
In this new home, the Associazione per l’Arte e la Cultura Collezione Casamonti – the association that runs the collection – now brings together around 250 works by masters of Italian and international art: a moving route through 28 rooms (once the stables of the nearby Palazzo Serristori) on two floors, presenting a selection of works of exceptional value that span the most important art movements of the 19th century, across different generations and artistic languages, alternating historical core groups, side-by-side comparisons between artists and in-depth sections on the leading stylistic and artistic explorations of the 20th century and of today.
Paintings, sculptures, installations and video works, from Giovanni Boldini all the way to Maurizio Cattelan by way of Picasso, Ernst, Magritte, Burri, Manzoni, Basquiat and Kiefer – to name just a few – follow one another without necessarily keeping to a chronological thread, favoring instead a certain harmony of color broken up by sudden, striking contrasts.
Happy and still incredulous at an undertaking brought off with evident success, Roberto Casamonti looks around the rooms of the new gallery and wonders how he ever managed to bring together so many valuable works. “And yet I did it, I made a dream come true,” he said. “After three years of work, we are opening this museum space, which I think is a great gift to Florence, a city that deserves a contemporary art gallery on a par with many of the great international museums.”
The collection of works from its historic home at Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni in Piazza Santa Trinita, enriched by further pieces “on loan” from the collection of Tornabuoni Arte, the gallery on the Lungarno Cellini, has thus found a new “home” here. A wide-ranging collection, originally split between these two exhibition venues, is now being reshaped, marking a new phase of a cultural project that began fifty years ago and is still evolving.
We can already reveal that Palazzo San Giorgio will open up to guided group tours, with educational visits along its historical and artistic routes, including for children and their families; there will also be a calendar of visits for schools, universities and academies, designed to bring students closer to the history of contemporary art and to encourage critical thinking when looking at works of art.
