Giuseppe Ugonia Civic Museum

The museum brings together an extensive collection of the distinguished Brisighella lithographer.

Giuseppe Ugonia, Faentine by birth but Brisighella by adoption, was a painter and lithographer who inspired many of his best works by the nature and history of Brisighella.
His engraving skills won him fame and recognition in Italy and abroad, and his works are exhibited in top museums such as the Uffizi and the British Museum and
preserved in numerous private collections, however, he never left Brisighella and his position as a teacher at the local Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.
The Giuseppe Ugonia Museum, opened in 1994 in the nineteenth-century Pretura building, houses about four hundred works, donated by his wife Elena, and the archive of the artist’s memoirs.
Giuseppe Ugonia, painter and lithographer, tied his name to Brisighella. Even today, Brisighella, with its streets and colors, its silences and its three hills, preserves intact the visions and
images that inspired this artist’s long solitary meditation. Who, at the passage of two centuries, chose to depict the nature and history of a sublime but secluded place with
a very special technique such as lithography. To Brisighella, Fafina (that was his nickname), dedicates the most beautiful of his color views. Love, the refinement of subtle color combinations, and sophisticated lithographic technique produced delicate and warm icons for the comfort of the heart.

A friend and fellow student of Domenico Baccarini, he soon became part of his so-called “cenacle.” That is, evening meetings attended by this group of student artists from the
same school, animated by the same fervor for art. They gathered to draw and engrave, discuss culture and literature. Baccarini encouraged Ugonia to practice drawing.
Directly on the stone. In 1908 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. During his time in Bologna he deepened his knowledge of lithography, electing this technique as his main source of expression. Ugonia begins with drawing, intensely cultivated since the days of the Faenza Cenacle. The drawings can be sketches from life, studies for two-color and multi-color lithographs. The former reproduce human figures, poses of children. Which, concise and essential, will serve his vast production of tickets that contemplates, unlike lithographs, the presence of the human figure.
The preparatory drawings for the lithographs more closely follow the path that will lead to the translation on stone, follow its slow and steady evolution, its gradual approach to the final vision. The skillfully engraved stone will allow, with the help of the lathe and special passes of color on the surface, multiple lithographic copies to be made.

Primarily epistolary relationship with friend and critic Francesco Sapori. His journals, next to letters, consist of watercolors, a daily way to relate to the things of the world especially through the landscape.

Civic Museum “G. Ugonia”
Piazzetta Porta Gabolo 1,
48013 Brisighella RA
Tel. 0546.85777