With love:
Collecting, Commissioning and Restoring Beethovenian Art in Italy
What role does Beethoven play in the public and private art collections in Italy? I would like to present in Alpiarça three different highlights.
The first story concerns a restoration of a forgotten bust of Beethoven (1897) made by Leonardo Bistolfi, the most relevant Italian symbolist sculptor. This important piece of Beethoven’s iconography recently resurfaced is exhibited at the Bistolfi Museum and Cast Gallery of Casale Monferrato (Piemonte) together with the portrait of its buyer, the composer Luigi Ernesto Ferraria.
In Muggia, northeast Italy, province of Trieste, there is the so-called “Biblioteca beethoveniana,” a private house museum which contains a collection entirely dedicated to Beethoven. Forty years of work and research later, the Carrino’s Family collection comprises more than 11,000 items. As collectors, their purpose is to explore Beethoven’s myth and legacy in different form of art and crafts: books, sculptures, paintings, engravings and graphics, ex libris, medals, and objets d’art, but also ephemera like postcards. We will have the opportunity of discovering together some selected items of this collection.
In central Italy, a music enthusiast – the lawyer Guglielmo Borgiani – commissioned a new bust of Beethoven to the sculptor Marco Cingolani. His work is based on the marble bust by Hugo Hagen (1859). Through careful iconographic study, a double re-interpretation of Beethoven saw the light. We are happy to share with you this works of art whose creation we supervised step by step with love.
Benedetta Saglietti, a music historian, teaches at Conservatory of music (Brescia). She is an expert in music iconography and and a Beethoven scholar. Saglietti was asked to contribute to the exhibition catalogue Ludwig van. Le mythe Beethoven (Gallimard 2016) and curated the Beethoven room of Vedere la musica (Rovigo 2021). In 2020 Saglietti published La Quinta Sinfonia di Beethoven recensita da E.T.A. Hoffmann, prefaced by Riccardo Muti. She edited de Vienney’s memoir Una visita a Beethoven (2014). Her first acclaimed book Beethoven, ritratti e immagini appeared in 2010.
Her research interests include the relationship between music and color and the autobiography of German-speaking musicians in the first half of 18th century.
Objects and Images of Music in Public and Private Art Museums 