Trieste and the National Gallery of Ancient Art
A city of trade and commerce and a junction between the Mediterranean and central-northern Europe, Trieste was, during the Austrian Empire, a center of attraction for entrepreneurs, merchants, real estate developers, ship owners, artisans, investers from all over Europe and the Near East: a world hiving of activity around the “free port” – established three hundred years ago – exactly on 19 March 1719 – and where the Armenian colony played a important role. After the arrival of the first Mechitarist fathers, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Armenian nation is developed thanks to the imperial diploma issued by Maria Teresa of Habsburg on May 30, 1775, which granted official recognition to the Mechitarist order, favoring the establishment of the Armenian community; with such document, the monks were recognized as Austrian subjects were granted in concession the church of the Holy Martyrs. The community rapidly prospered thanks to the arrival of new members from various parts of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, including Venice, Cairo, Smyrna, Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Persia and Transylvania, allowing and wealthy Armenian merchants to successfully developing their own companies.
The intersection of ethnic groups, cultures, religions and the dynamic economic development therefore favored the development of culture and the birth of art collections by connoisseurs and art lovers as the expression of the new nineteenth-century capitalism: These same connoisseurs will later donate their collections to the city starting the creation of civic museums. From the eighteenth century onwards, the vocation to collect paintings – in the growing desire of entrepreneurial cosmopolitanism to approach the major artistic movements – characterized the rich merchant bourgeoisie of Trieste.
However, since the interest of the collectors was centered on the major European artistic art movements that were in vogue at the time, leaving a significant gap in the ancient art :. Fortunately the gap was later filled by the acquisition from the Italian State of the Pietro Mentasti collection between 1955 and 1957, a Milanese connoisseur (1897 – 1958) and protagonist of the Venetian cultural art circles during the thirties, not to mention a refined connoisseur of paintings of great interest and quality that ranged from the Renaissance to Rococo. Thanks to the integration of his collection, the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Trieste was inaugurated in 1957.
The exhibition “The shape of color. From Tintoretto to Canaletto “exhibits the works of the Gallery with a new interpretation, providing a narrative of the history of Italian art through the lens of the main art currents that developed in Northern Italy between the 16th and 18th centuries.
