Orantis Imago. 20th-century works in the collections of the Museo Diocesano Tridentino
On Friday 15 December 2023 the Museo Diocesano Tridentino opened the exhibition entitled "Orantis Imago. Works of the 20th century in the collections of the Museo Diocesano Tridentino", realised in collaboration with Mart, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto and curated by Domizio Cattoi and Alessandra Tiddia. This event represents a unique opportunity for the public to immerse themselves in the beauty of the contemporary art collections of the Museo Diocesano Tridentino, which are usually kept in storage and for the most part never shown to the public.
The museum's contemporary art collection comprises more than two thousand eight hundred works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and ex-libris, mainly by artists from Trentino in the period between the beginning of the 19th century and today. The most conspicuous nucleus of the collection is due to the passion and commitment of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Fedrizzi, director of the museum in the 1940s and 1950s.
The exhibition displays a selection of about forty works from the collection and represents a valuable opportunity to bring the public's attention back to the important heritage of art usually kept in the depositories, in order to reconcile the function of conservation with the aims of research and valorisation.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a work by Tullio Garbari that recalls a fundamental dimension of the human being, beyond all religious beliefs. In addition to works with a sacred theme, the exhibition presents examples of other artistic genres, such as landscapes and portraits: from Fortunato Depero to Marcello Iras Baldessari, from Umberto Moggioli to Luigi Bonazza, the selection brings together, alongside well-known masterpieces by the protagonists of the early 20th century, works by other artists that have never before been exhibited to the public, in an evocative overview of paintings, sculpture and engravings that reaches back to the 1980s.