17 February 2023

“Pilgrim’s Journey”: Isola Bella to Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia.

The work held in the Sala del Pellegrino [Pilgrim’s Room] in Palazzo Borromeo on Lago Maggiore is on loan to the Fondazione Brescia Musei for the exhibition devoted to Giacomo Ceruti that is included in the programme of Italian Capital of Culture 2023.

Stresa, 16 February 2023 – The exhibition “Miseria&Nobiltà. Giacomo Ceruti in 18th-Century Europe” was inaugurated a few days ago at the Museum of Santa Giulia in Brescia and will remain open to the public until 28 May. The cultural initiative promoted by Fondazione Brescia Musei inaugurates the year of Giacomo Ceruti within the programme of Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023.

This is the most important exhibition to ever be devoted to the Lombard painter. The exhibition itinerary has been created also thanks to extraordinary loans from all over the world: one of these is the work “Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume” (1681-1752) by Peeter Snijers from Palazzo Borromeo on Isola Bella, a destination on the Terre Borromeo tourism circuit on Lago Maggiore.

The painting, which is among the art treasures of the Borromeo family, has inspired the name of one of the rooms in the Palazzo, the Pilgrim’s Room. Purchased in 1825, the large canvas depicts a pilgrim who is almost natural size and who possesses the characteristic elements of pilgrimage, almost representing a manifesto of the taste for pauperism that won over the European bourgeoisie in the first half of the 18th century.
The exhibition, curated by Roberta D’Adda, Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, compares 60 works by the painter considered “the most adventurous of the 18th century” with 40 paintings by earlier authors or others contemporary to him. It offers a new interpretation of the artist who was able, in his representations, to range from suffering humanity to serene intonations, from scenes of poverty to the most up-to-date and refined tendencies in European art.