Municipal Art Gallery of Faenza

The oldest museum institution in Romagna, established in 1796, where “there is the history of a city that was an artistic capital.”

A history illustrated by 200 works of art, from the Painted Cross of the 1200s to Donatello and the masterpieces of the Renaissance to the paintings of the great Italian twentieth century by De Chirico, Savinio and Morandi.

The Pinacoteca Comunale is Faenza’s oldest museum institution and one of the oldest in the Emilia-Romagna region: it was founded in 1797, when the Municipality of Faenza purchased Giuseppe Zauli’s collection of works of art. In the same year he began the acquisition of paintings from convents and churches suppressed under Napoleonic laws.
As the collections continued to grow, the Picture Gallery was duly opened to the public in 1879 in the former Jesuit convent. Since then, and up to the present day, the artistic heritage has been greatly increased by rich donations from private individuals, deposits from public agencies, and archaeological finds that have emerged as a result of construction activities.
The Art Gallery’s collections are divided into two sections: the Ancient Section and the Modern Art Gallery. The Ancient Section presents a broad overview of art and history from Roman times to the 18th century: mosaics, tombstones, sculptures, and Roman and early medieval epigraphs.
The largest and most qualified part of the collections is made up of paintings and sculptures that allow one to travel through five centuries of Faenza and Italian art. The funds from the 1200s and 1300s are small, but of great value. Far broader is the panorama offered by the works of the 15th and 16th centuries;
in addition to the late Gothic panels, great importance is occupied by the artists who spread the Renaissance in Faenza: Biagio d’Antonio, G. B. Bertucci the Elder, Marco Palmezzano, Donatello, A. Rossellino, and the Master of the Pala Bertoni.
Impressive is the collection of 16th- and 17th-century altarpieces “migrated” from churches in Faenza:
document the vitality of artistic culture within Mannerism that culminated in Ferraù Fenzoni, the artist who bridged the baroque century. Among the most prominent thematic cores: still lifes by Recco, Ruoppolo, Boselli, Resani, Magini and Levoli, with whom we enter the sec. XVIII. From this period are the landscapes, battles, and genre paintings, often anonymous, sometimes by notable artists: A. Locatelli, S. Orlandi, G. Bucci and F. Guardi.
The first nucleus of the Gallery of Modern Art was formed in 1879, when F. Argnani took care to include some works by contemporary authors in the exhibition itinerary. In the following decades-thanks to purchases and, above all, increasing donations-the holdings of paintings and sculpture from the 1800s and 1900s grew to such an extent that the problem of adequate exhibition space was raised.