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Accademia Carrara A Collectors’ Museum
Two Centuries of History The Accademia Carrara has more than two centuries of history behind it. This is a considerable amount of time for an institution that can boast of being one of the oldest picture galleries in Lombardy and a gallery that over the years has built a strong identity as a museum for collections and collectors.
Founded at the end of the eighteenth century thanks to the generosity of a private citizen, Giacomo Carrara (1714-1796), the Accademia has seen its wealth of holdings grow significantly thanks to a steady series of donations and bequests, bearing witness to an unbroken tradition of affection and patronage initiated by Count Carrara’s generous gesture. This tradition was sealed in 1958, when the City of Bergamo became the owner of the institution, at which point it became a civic museum in all respects.
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An art connoisseur and scholar, Giacomo Carrara acquired a very extensive collection of paintings, drawings and prints. He made these available to enthusiasts and founded a School of Painting.
In 1796, at the end of an entire lifetime dedicated to the study and promotion of the arts, he made the Gallery and School his successor, to be managed by the Commissioner, a body composed of members of the aristocracy of Bergamo. To equip the School with adequate space and give the Carrara collection an appropriate exhibition venue - a collection which in 1804 saw the addition of a sizeable group of paintings from the Venetian collection of Salvatore Orsetti - in 1810, the architect Simone Elia completed the construction of a new building in neoclassical style. Today it continues to be the site of the museum, while the school, between 1912 and 1914, was relocated to the garden in the back.
A reorganization of the gallery was necessary, as it was still organized as a seventeenth-century quadreria or picture gallery. Therefore in 1835, a part of the collections was auctioned off and this decision led to the depletion of the collection and particularly the Baroque and Rococo works. Over the course of more than two centuries, the Accademia Carrara’s patrimony has seen an extraordinary growth thanks to the many donations received by the museum. Some of the main donations include the legacy of Count Guglielmo Lochis (1789-1859), public administrator, politician and formidable collector. His prestigious collection was left to the City of Bergamo, which gave
up a part of the collection, but did however keep 240 important paintings. Shortly after, in 1891, the museum also received the collection of paintings by Giovanni Morelli (1816 -1891), one of the founding fathers of modern art history. Alongside the major donations received over the years, a rich constellation of more than two hundred precious legacies have enhanced the Accademia Carrara’s holdings, which now amount to 1,800 paintings. Added to these are an extensive and important collection of drawings and prints and precious groups of decorative arts including bronzes, medals, fans and porcelain. The last bequest in order of time comes from Federico Zeri (1921 -1998), one of the greatest art connoisseurs of the twentieth century, who left his collection of sculptures to the Carrara.
The New Organisation The Accademia Carrara reopens to the public in April of 2015. In the seven years of closure required for the necessary restoration and adaptation of the museum’s systems and facilities, the museum carried out an intensive study of its specific characteristics, with the resulting new organization of the permanent collection.
The new tour of the Accademia Carrara is arranged over two floors and comprises twenty-eight exhibit rooms of different sizes, thirteen on the first floor and fifteen on the second, for a total of over six hundred works on display, including paintings, which represent the majority, and sculptures. The itinerary winds along a span of five centuries, from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and touches upon the main Italian schools of painting, including Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria, but also painting from beyond the Alps, from Flanders and Holland in particular.
The purpose of the guide is to give visitors an orientation tool for the museum tour. It is divided into eight sections which group together clusters of consecutive and homogenous exhibit rooms. Each section is introduced by a short text, which provides a concise framework for the different topics covered
in the exhibit rooms, and is accompanied by brief informative texts for the major works. Of the more than six hundred pieces in the exhibition, the reader will find updated news on a selection of sixty paintings and sculptures that form the backbone of the museum and provide an idea of the richness and variety of its collections.
This second edition, printed in March 2019, almost four years after the first, published in April 2015, has been revised and updated also on the basis of the results of the recent publication of the first volume of the museum’s scientific catalog: Accademia Carrara Bergamo. Dipinti del Trecento e del Quattrocento. Catalogo completo , a cura di G. Valagussa, Milano 2018.
The hope is that the guide, as well as accompanying the visitor through the museum, will also help relive this experience later, motivating and stimulating further visits to the Accademia Carrara.
