Farnesina Collection, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation

The Farnesina Collection is a collection of 20th century Italian artworks located within the Palace of the Farnesina, the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. With the creation of the Collezione Farnesina in 2001, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has made of contemporary artistic research an area of strategic intervention of its cultural policy.

The acquisition formula based on loan agreements, free of charge, has led to a steady development of the collection through particularly relevant works for the history of Italian art in the 20th century: from Arturo Martini to Mario Sironi, from Carla Accardi to Jannis Kounellis.

The collection, edited by Maurizio Calvesi until 2013, contains the most representative expressions of the visual arts of the 20th century Italian. The paintings, sculptures, installations and mosaics are distributed in the large spaces of the Farnesina building on the long path formed by corridors, meeting rooms and ministry environments.

The collection follows the history of 20th-century Italian art through the currents of Art Nouveau, Futurism, Metaphysics, Artisticism, Poor Art, Transavanguardia, to the latest artistic productions, and includes important works of art Duilio Cambellotti, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Fortunato Depero, Mario Sironi, Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Alberto Burri, Carla Accardi, Luigi Montanarini, Getulio Alviani, Piero Dorazio, Osvaldo Licini, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova, Renato Guttuso, Fabrizio Plessi and Ardengo Soffici, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Ceroli, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Alighiero Boetti and Giulio Paolini, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, Roberto Almagno, Andrea Vizzini, Getulio Alviani, Omar Galliani, Bice Lazzari, Gino Marotta, Paola Gandolfi, Stefano Di Stasio, Nunzio, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Giuseppe Gallo and Mustafa Sabbagh.

The collection
The Farnesina Collection, contemporary art collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, was born in 2000 on the initiative of the then Secretary General Amb. Umberto Vattani, to underline a precise planning direction of the Ministry, which has made contemporary artistic research a strategic intervention area of ​​its cultural policy.

Starting from a first significant nucleus of acquisitions, which saw the commission of an important decorative apparatus and numerous works of art during the 1950s and 1960s, the work of several scientific committees gave rise to a selection that collected works of the highest profile for the history of Italian art of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century
The choices made over time have privileged historical masters of the first half of the twentieth century, between Futurism (Balla, Boccioni, Depero), Metaphysics (de Chirico) and return to figuration, in its twentieth century twentieth-century declension (Carrà, Sironi, Soffici) and anti-Novecento (Cagli, Campigli, Pirandello, Scipione, Martini), as well as protagonists of the post-war period, both in the realist (Guttuso) and abstractionist (Accardi, Sanfilippo, Dorazio, Consagra), and in the informal (Afro, Burri, Scarpitta) spatialist (Fontana).

Equally documented the developments of the second half of the twentieth century, in the poor (Kounellis, Merz, Paolini), pop (Angeli, Pascali, Rotella, Schifano), conceptual (Isgrò, Mauri, Manzoni) and perceptive (Castellani, Bonalumi, Marchegiani ), until the last decades of the century, between Nuova figurazione (Vespignani), Anachronism (Mariani, Galliani, Gandolfi) and Transavanguardia (Chia, Cucchi, Paladino).

Layout
The arrangement and layout of the Farnesina Collection – which currently concerns the ground, raised, first, second and fourth floors of the building, and which in perspective will extend to the entire building – was guided and set on three criteria. First of all, we moved towards an update of the works on display, focusing above all on the research of recent decades, while maintaining some elements of continuity with the history of the collection. The second criterion was the harmonious relationship with the internal spaces of the Palazzo della Farnesina and with the artistic interventions coeval with the architectural structure or immediately subsequent. Finally, a certain quality of presentation of the works was privileged, to improve their visibility, lighting and explanatory apparatuses,

The halls on the main floor
Monumental works by Emilio Vedova, Sandro Chia, Osvaldo Calò and Michelangelo Pistoletto found their place in the Atrium of Honor. The staircase that goes up to the first floor has kept the two sculptures by Mirko and the tapestry by Sergio Selva, while the solemnity of the Hall of Honor communicates with works by Burri, Novelli, Mochetti and Piacentino.

The Forma 1 Room, which historically housed the first nucleus of the Farnesina Collection, includes works by some of the artists who had originally been part of the group of the same name, such as Accardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Perilli, Sanfilippo and Turcato.

We also wanted to give some importance to the corridors, which with their extension (equal, in the whole Palace, to 6.5 kilometers) are one of the hallmarks of the Palace, including some in the exhibition itinerary. That said of the Ceremonial compares the cine-visual researches of Alviani, Biasi, Bonalumi and those between pop and conceptual of Ceroli, Mauri and Kounellis. The corridor of the General Secretariat is divided into three parts: in the first, different forms of return to figuration are compared, with works by Mario Merz, Ontani and Patella, while in the second, artists made their debut on the Roman scene in the eighties such as Nunzio, Tirelli, Bianchi and Pirri. Ideally collected in a third section are the works by Spalletti, Griffa, Giliberti, Cotani and Rotella, as well as photographs by Basilico and Jodice.

Two site-specific interventions by Remo Salvadori characterize the Mappamondi Room, where the documentaries of Sironi and the sculptures by Martini and Marini of the previous setting are still present, documenting the moment of the “twentieth century”.

The second floor: the 80s and 90s
The second floor contains a selection, very heterogeneous, of the voices of the artists who animated the panorama of Italian art between the 80s and 90s. The set-up, inaugurated in May 2016, is still under development.

The fourth floor: the construction site of the Palazzo della Farnesina and the artists of the 21st century
Furthermore, two exhibitions are exhibited on the fourth floor of the Palazzo della Farnesina. The first, dedicated to the building site of the building itself, includes reproductions of Enrico Del Debbio’s drawings (from the exteriors of the 1930s to the interiors of the 1950s) and a selection of works acquired by competition from the Ministry during the 1960s, together with some sketches.

The second, with the title “System”, collects a selection of works that want to testify the plurality of voices and expressions of contemporary art of the last twenty years, with a particular focus on the younger generations. The works presented here come, for one part, from some of the artists who participated in the various editions of the ITaliens exhibition at the Embassy of Italy in Berlin (2010-2011), for the other part from the selection made by the Scientific Committee of the Collection.

The Zero Space
Finally, on the ground floor, the “Zero Space” houses, in rotation, some particularly significant works set up together with the artists themselves: at this moment you can admire “Love difference – Mediterranean Sea” and “Terzo paradiso” by Michelangelo Pistoletto, and “Materia first “by Fabrizio Plessi.

Exhibitions
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Foreign Ministry Collection has been exhibited several times in international exhibitions.

In 2004 the exhibition Balla Alla Transavanguardia. One hundred years of Italian art at the Farnesina. Is at the Triennale of Milan.

In 2005 the Collection is exhibited in India: Italian Art 1950-1970. Masterpieces from the Farnesina Collection, (1950-1970 Italian Art from the Farnesina Collection), at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

In 2006, with the exhibition of Italian Signs from the Collection of Contemporary Art to the Farnesina, it is presented at the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade.

In 2007, the works of 20 Masters of the Farnesina Collection were exhibited at the exhibition space ExhibAir of Malpensa Airport. In the same year the collection is exposed to the public in the Open Doors category. On May 4, 2007, to promote Italian art abroad, the Farnesina launched a traveling exhibition entitled Travel to Italian Art 1950-1980. 100 works from the Farnesina Collection. The exhibition exhibits between 100 and 100 works of the Collection in 2007 in a different cities of the world. The Journey to the Italian Art in 2007 is in several countries of the south-east and central Europe: the National Gallery of Modern Art in Sarajevo (May), the National Museum of Foreign Art in Sofia (June) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (July-October), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (November-December), at the National Museum of Brukenthal in Sibiu (September-October) and at the Wilanow Palace Museum in Warsaw (December-January). In 2008 the exhibition travels to Latin America: Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima, Caracas, and Guadalajara.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, also indicated with the acronym MAECI or as Farnesina, from the name of its headquarters, the Palazzo della Farnesina in Rome, is the dicastery of the Italian government which has the task of implementing The foreign policy of the Italian government. Represents Italy in the international context.

With the creation of the Collezione Farnesina in 2001, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has made of contemporary artistic research an area of strategic intervention of its cultural policy.

The acquisition formula based on loan agreements, free of charge, has led to a steady development of the collection through particularly relevant works for the history of Italian art in the 20th century: from Arturo Martini to Mario Sironi, from Carla Accardi to Jannis Kounellis.

The free loan of use
The acquisition formula adopted, of the free loan for use, has allowed a constant development of the consistency of the collection and a regular rotation of the works, currently more than 400. The direct initiative of the artists or their heirs, as well as the collaboration with prestigious museum institutions, galleries and foundations, has proven to be a strong sign of confidence in the action of the Ministry.

The scientific committee
Thanks to the contribution of the Scientific Committee currently in charge, established on April 22, 2013, the Farnesina Collection has recently been enriched with a core of works by protagonists of the Italian art scene in the second half of the twentieth century (Burri, Accardi, Sanfilippo, Vedova, Turcato) , with an increasingly attentive look at recent research (Zorio, Piacentino, Mochetti, Salvadori).

Also to follow up on the natural vocation to the contemporary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the reflections currently underway also involve the renewal of the set-up of the collection and the improvement of museum standards. The project for the acquisition of works by the youngest generations of Italian artists and that resulting from the collaboration with the MAXXI in Rome, which saw the preparation of a significant selection of the museum’s collections at the Farnesina on the occasion of the Semester, fit into this frame. Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.