Piemonte Italia

Galleria d’arte moderna Paolo e Adele Giannoni

The Modern Art Gallery, located in the important Broletto complex, consists of the prestigious collection donated to the Municipality of Novara by cavalier Alfredo Giannoni (1862-1944), which includes hundreds of paintings and works of internationally acclaimed Italian artists. A collection that began in the first decade of the 1900s, also through the friendship with Alessandro Viglio, director of the Musei Civici of Novara (Civic Museums) in 1917: the first group mainly includes artists from Lombardy such as Giovanni Sottocornola and Achille Tominetti but, thanks to the friendship with Carlo Fornara and Giovanni Battista Ciolina, is also able to welcome works of Enrico Cavalli and, in general, artists from the Val Vigezzo area. From the Divisionism era, the collector of Novara acquired the works of Angelo Morbelli, the Ligurian artist Rubaldo Merello and the Roman artists Enrico Lionne and Camillo Innocenti. During the course of the 20s, the collection was also enriched by works of significant size, and the choices range from the late romantic 1800s and its verist implications, to the intimist and reassuring first part of the 1900s: naturalism is declined in all of its regional articulations, from the Piedmontese artists (Antonio Fontanesi, Lorenzo Delleani), to those from Lombardy (Eugenio Gignous, Pompeo Mariani, Achille Formis, Camillo Rapetti, Paolo Sala), to the Venetians (Guglielmo Ciardi, Angelo Dall’Oca Bianca, Alessandro Milesi, Ettore Tito) to the Tuscans (Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini, Luigi Gioli), from the Romans (Hermann Corrodi) to the Neapolitans (Giuseppe De Nittis, Giacinto Gigante, Filippo e Giuseppe Palizzi). A compact group of works representing the Italian 1900s was acquired from the Galleria Cotroney in Novara during the 20s, and constitutes the final point of the articulated collection: Domenico De Bernardi, Cesare Monti, Pietro Marussig, Baccio Maria Bacci and Achille Funi on the one hand, and Francesco Trombadori, Francesco Casorati, Giovanni Costetti, and Gianni Vagnetti on the other. With these developments, the collection, which begins in a local and Lombard key, aims at a larger scope of National representation.