Palazzo Franchetti
8th March -27th July 2008
The Masterpieces of Mario Tarangoni’s collection

Palazzo Franchetti in Venice has made a choice: the art collection. Last year the self-portraits from the Uffizi were exhibited. This year it is the time for another collector, namely Mario Tarangoni, a man of the Twentieth century who dealt with banks and business, who had a personal idea about the Italian painting of the Nineteenth century and with a probing patience, curiosity, passion and method, brought together a wide range of small masterpieces. Small for their dimensions, small for their intimate, sentimental, poetic character. Actually, they are great for the new look we can have at the most beautiful season of our modern artistic history.
Mario Tarangoni, who was a great middle-class man of the Thirties, had been the director of the Bank of America and Italy in Genova; he did not used to buy to invest. When he bought something, he bought as he was urged by that kind of curiosity we can at best define by means of the expression ‘falling in love’. The refined anthological collection related to the Tuscanian Nineteenth century, exhibited at Palazzo Franchetti, acquires a relevant scientific importance because it creates a perspective that, though not unknown, is, with no doubt, unusual as far as the movement of the macchiaioli is concerned. A new perspective, a point of view which are invented and experimented by a cultured collector who had read books, studied and evaluated critics, historians, art dealers, but who, then, ultimately, had been able to examine by means of his eyes and to decide with his mind and his heart.