25th April – 1st May 2008
Campo St. Maurizio

The name Bochaleri dates back to 1300, when the workers of Venetian ceramic, a refined production appreciated all over Europe, organized in a corporation known as the Scutelarii first and then in Bochaleri. This ancient art, suppressed by a Napoleon decree in 1806, has survived history and oblivion thanks to the efforts of artisans who through the years have conserved and handed down jealously the secrets of the production of tankards and their fine decorations. This year too, close to the Festa of the Sensa, the ‘I Bochaleri’ association is organizing a true fair in Campo San Maurizio from April 25th to May 1st. Visitors can watch all the phases of production and decoration of the ceramic, and children, in particular, may create little objects in clay under the supervision of the expert ‘bochaleri’.

The ‘‘Belle Ferroniere’’, namely Leonardo’s masterpiece, is going to be the testimonial of the exhibition ‘The Louvre. Masterpieces in Verona. Leonardo, Rffaello, Rembrandt and others. Portraits and images’ which, on 19th September, will open at the Gran Guardia of Verona. The exhibition is the first one of a four-year project which starting from next autumn to 2011 wants to take, yearly, never seen masterpieces, coming from the greatest museums in the world, to Verona. Five are the sections of the exhibition itinerary, the first one of them will be just dedicated to the Portrayal of a society. The impressive setting up is made of about 140 works and it is part of an display project that until 2011 will see Verona holding never seen masterpieces coming from the most important museums in the world, actually from Louvre, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, from the Museum Rodinin Paris to Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Kroller Muller Museum in Otterlo.
The exhibition holds the lead of being the first one in Europe for getting such a borrowing from Louvre Museum. Subdivided into five sections it will propose, among lots of works of art, Botticelli’s, Tiziano’s, Goya’s, El Greco’s, Ribera’s, Ingres’s, David’s, Holbein’s, Cranach’s, Veronese’s, Rembrandt’s, Fragonard’s masterpieces.
And also Velasquez and Durer, Botticelli’s ‘Sacred Motherhoods’, Bronzino, Filippino Lippi, Carracci, Poussin, Vouet. The allegorical portraits of Tiziano and Rubens. To go on with Raffaello, Gericault, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Van Dick, Guido Reni, Georges de la Tour, Ingres, Guercino, Bernini.

Palazzo Mocenigo
from march 29 to june 1, 2008

Marisa Bronzini (1920 – 2007) undisputed maestro and delicate weaver, is one of the leading exponent of the Contemporary Textile Art.
This homage presents more than thirty art works which go over her artistic career during the whole XX century.

The exhibition takes place in the Musuem where on the ground flour you can see tapestries and other works of big dimensions, while on the first flour there are more than twenty beautiful textile sculptures.

Moreover a selection of contemporary “Artistic Rugs”, coming from Sardinia, installed on the first flour, pays homage to Marisa Bronzini’s exceptional craft and artistic competences.

2008 will be a remarkable year for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: the museum is organizing a full calendar of conferences, meetings, educational workshops, temporary exhibitions, free guided visits, a movie program inspired by Peggy’s life and a concert during the summer, to celebrate 60 years of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Beginning with the subjects of the temporary exhibitions, Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s and Carlo Cardazzo. A New Vision for Art, the program intends to underscore the importance of the relationship between Peggy and American art, and additionally her influence on the Venetian artistic landscape between the 50s and the 60s, highlighting two different sides of a unique artistic passion that marked the life of this outstanding American patron.
The program is supported by the Veneto Region (Regione Veneto) and benefits from the patronage of the City of Venice. All the events have been made possible thanks to the contribution of Hausbrandt, Hotel Gritti Palace, Safilens and Trend.

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.       

VERONA, PALAZZO DELLA RAGIONE
15th March – 29th June 2008

The exhibition, that will open on 15th March 2008, is organized at the Palazzo della Ragione in Verona and it testifies, by means of paintings, glassware and photos from the Collection of Venice Foundation, the one-hundred-year-old relationship between Venice and the Biennale.
It is a story represented by about fifty paintings, among which the works by Boccioni and the Ciardis, De Pisis and Carena, Casorati and Depero, Cagnaccio of San Pietro and Marussig, Vedova and Santomaso, Pizzinato, Tancredi and Plessi stand out.
A story rich in art events, cultural arguments, political revolutions and even sensational scandals, since the foundation, which took place in 1895, of the greatest Italian cultural institute, able to involve, every two years, more than 70 foreign countries, going through the ‘noisy’ arrival of the Futurists in Venice in 1910, the explosion of the America Pop Art in 1964, the student protest of ’68, the statutory renewal of 1973, until the events of our days.
The exhibition itinerary is made up also of about thirty Murano glassworks, placed in the historical Venetian Pavillion, among which we can find, beside those of legendary glassworkers, the works of well-known artists and designers such as Tapio Wirkkala, Carlo Scarpa and Paolo Venini. This exhibition opens with a selection of photos of the greatest protagonists of the art of the Twentieth century, who are often portrayed at work during the organization of

Last 11th March 2008 the presentation of Architecture Biennale 2008 “Out there. Architecture Beyond Building’’ took place. Like the very title of this exhibition suggests, according Aaron Betsky (photo), the new director of such sector, architecture is not building, on the contrary, buildings are frequently the tomb of architecture. The Biennale, then, must not be just a collection of works of art, just an exhibition, but it must be a cultural event involving everybody and thus playing a role inside society: it must get us to meditate and create opportunities for dialogue and change of ideas.
It is for this reason that we maybe expect an Architecture Biennale sui generis ‘with no buildings, no photos, no cards’. Even if, for the time being, just at times, we can find, thanks to some wealthy purchasers, some architectural works of art which, by means of sensuality and sensitivity, give form to the surrounding environment, yet it is true that we can enjoy ideal spaces in films, in art, -”There is much more architecture in a film by Antonioni than  in Garretta!”. We can watch these spaces grow around us in the carefully planned landscapes that are our last true public spaces.
Then architecture could be considered – Aaron Betsky said- above all as a ‘way of figuring out what we need to build and what to unbuild. Architecture could be, first of all, experimentation, we need a sort of architecture that does not solve problems, but poses, frames and articulates them”.
In such Biennale, thus, the Arsenale will be the right location for experiments, where visitors will have the opportunity to

from march 15, 2008 to july 21, 2008
Fortuny Museum

Including clothes, accessories and trompe-l’oeil creations, the eighty-plus pieces in this show are all made of paper.

Demonstrating the extraordinary skill and unmistakable talent of the Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave, the exhibition also offers an unusual account of the world of Mariano Fortuny, with the evocative works organised within his palazzo-museum to illustrate significant figures and episodes in his life.

Conjuring up the climate within which Fortuny lived and worked, this ‘exhibition-installation’ reflects all the various facets of the talent of a contemporary artist who is also a designer, and director. It reveals the different ways in which she has been inspired by Mariano Fortuny’s intellectual heritage and by the museum which perpetuates it.

from february 16 to may 4, 2008

Correr Museum

A courageous project – an exhibition conceived as a single work of art, with nine rooms on the second floor of the Museo Correr housing some forty different pieces.
Lawrence Carroll is an American artist of Australian origin who now works in Venice. This exhibition is not an attempt to provide a critical pigeonhole for his 25-year career; nor does it aim to present works in chronological order. Instead, the exhibition itself is a creative work, with the artist freely expressing himself in various site-specific installations that are adapted to the size of each individual room. Various strands link neighbouring rooms; overall, there is a continuing shift in visual and spatial perception, with an exploration of different materials and themes. Placed against the walls, in the corners or on the floor, these works of varying size comprise both identifiable objects and more abstract content. The overall effect is one of great poetic impact.

26th January -20th April 2008
Gallerie dell’Accademia

Titian shown in the latest stage of his activity, when the artist, who was already about sixty-year-old, had to deal with a new way of painting which had to be looser, more sensual and spiritual at the same time: here is the painter from Belluno, as shown in the monographic exhibition arriving at the Gallerie dell’Accademia of Venice, from 26th January to 20th April, after the success achieved at the exposition in Vienna. There are 28 masterpieces in all - realized by Titian during the period from 1550 to his death occurred in 1576 just in Venice - thanks to which visitors will have the opportunity to find out a kind of painting made of dense brush strokes quickly spreading on the canvases  and giving birth to broken up forms as well as theatrical and emotional representations.  
Extraordinary borrowings coming from the most important museums, which will be