Gallery of Ancient Art (Castle Museums)
Piazzale Patria del Friuli, 1, Udine
from 25 November 2023 to 28 April 2024
Palazzo Attems Petzenstein (Provincial Museums)
Piazzale Edmondo de Amicis, 2, Gorizia
from 14 December 2023 to 1 May 2024
curated by Liliana Cargnelutti, Vania Gransinigh and Alessandro Quinzi
The dual-venue exhibition aims to highlight the eighteent-century artistic and cultural osmosis in what is now Friuli Venezia Giulia, a disputed land between Venice, which until Napoleon’s invasion (1797) controlled the “Homeland of Friuli”, and the Habsburg Empire, which dominated Gorizia, Trieste and contiguous Slovenia. The suppression of the Patriarchate of Aquileia (1751) marked the separation between these tow areas, characterised by different languages, traditions and visions. However, this was not the case for art: in the eighteenth century, indeed, men and women who ferried their original ways of expressing art into these unaccustomed territories and found them receptive.
The County of Gorizia, for instance, soon became an important junction for those Venetian artists aiming to establish themselves in the Imperial lands. Exemplary are the cases of Giulio Quaglio or that of the Pacassi family, which first moved from Venice to Gorizia and in the second decade of the eighteenth century, with Giovanni Pacassi and the sculptor Pietro Baratta extended, with success, the activity to Vienna. The growth of the city and its hinterland, in connection with the architectural renewal of the churches in a post-Tridentine and Baroque sense, saw towards the middle of the century the establishment of the workshops of Pietro Bainville from Palmezzo, Antonio Paroli, with an outspoken Venetian background, and Johann Michael Lichtenreit, a Bavarian but adopted Gorizia. Individual episodes of qualified commissions stand out against this panorama. Prominent among this dense web of relationships are important commissions: Count Sigismondo Attems Petzenstein commissioned the Veronese Giambettino Cignaroli for the family altar, while Count Livio Lantieri created a collection of pastels by Francesco Pavona. A fashion, that of the pastel, which took hold after Emperor Charles VI’s visit to the city in 1728 when Rosalba Carriera reached the Isonzo capital, also moved by the hope, which would prove well-founded, of forging relations with the Viennese high nobility. On that very occasion she also portrayed some members of the Lantieri family.
In the same period, the history of Venetian Friuli was marked by the social rise of families of recent nobility such as the Manin family, while the personalities of Giovanni, Dionisio and Daniele Dolfin in the guise of Patriarchs of Aquileia ensured, in this strip of the Venetian mainland, the consolidation of a figurative culture of a predominantly Venetian brand.