I TAPPETI DELLA COLLEZIONE ZALESKI
The Fondazione Tassara in association with the Fondazione del Teatro Grande of Brescia is staging the SERENISSIME TRAME between Brescia and Venice. Carpets from the Zaleski collection exhibition, from 15 April to 4 June at the Ridotto del Teatro Grande. The exhibition, curated by Moshe Tabibnia e Francesca Fiorentino, presents eighteen precious ‘Transylvanian’ carpets from the Zaleski collection for the first time in Italy, in an evocative staging in the Brescian theatre’s sumptuous Rococo Ridotto.
The exhibition will be open from 15 April to 4 June on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 9 pm. Closed on 16 and 22 April. Special opening on Monday 17 April from 10 am to 9 pm. Free entrance.
The Zaleski family’s donation of a collection of 1325 ancient carpets to the Fondazione Tassara offers Brescia, venue of artistic and cultural events of an international range, a chance to share the extraordinary nature of this collection, the largest, most important and most complete in the world in private hands.
So there will be numerous reverberations from the presence of a unique and fascinating wealth of art like that of the carpets and infinite historical implications offered to the cultural development of the community: the carpet is in itself an extraordinary vehicle of knowledge for all at many levels.
Ridotto del Teatro Grande, Corso Zanardelli, Brescia
The exhibition presents eighteen precious ‘Transylvanian’ carpets from the Zaleski collection for the first time in Italy, in an evocative staging in the Brescian theatre’s sumptuous Rococo Ridotto and is connected to the important exhibition under way in Venice in the extraordinary late-Gothic Ca’ d’Oro – produced by the Polo museale del Veneto and the Fondazione Tassara, curated by Claudia Cremonini, Moshe Tabibnia and Giovanni Valagussa – featuring 26 ancient carpets from the same Zaleski collection, absolute masterpieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the trade routes with the East, accompanied by three examples from the Franchetti collection and six rare paintings from museums portraying Italian Renaissance carpets.
The ‘Transylvanians’ are Anatolian carpets with a single decoration, a highly original filiation of the Ottoman court carpets in the second half of the sixteenth century. They represent the theme of the niche in various inflexions, single, double, with or without columns, which was extremely important in all ancient societies as the main place for manifesting the sacred and majestic and one of the most appropriate for the actual function of the carpet with ancient peoples, where it represented a space reserved for the exceptional.
Already the object of refined collecting in the seventeenth century among the Hungarian and Transylvanian nobility, they were jealously safeguarded and kept in the local Lutheran churches.
‘Rediscovered’ and studied from the end of the nineteenth century, they were closely given close attention by scholars, who wrote numerous essays on them.
Their beauty, preciousness and uniqueness made them once again the object of collecting in the twentieth century, while their category represents one of the historic stages of the Anatolian carpet in which much of the Ottoman history, tradition and art of the seventeenth century can be read
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