MARTES | MUSEO D’ARTE SORLINI

The MarteS. Sorlini Art Museum is a private picture gallery opened to the public in spring 2018 in Calvagese della Riviera, in the Brescian hinterland of Lake Garda. The guided tour allows visitors to admire 185 paintings collected in over fifty years of passionate research by Brescian entrepreneur Luciano Sorlini (1925-2015). The Museum is housed in a spectacular 17th-century building and the tour includes 14 exhibition rooms covering a total area of over 1,000 square metres. The paintings that can be admired are mainly Venetian and Venetian; the coherence of this sensational ensemble has been known to art lovers ever since a selection of paintings from Bellini to Tiepolo was hosted in an exhibition at the Museo Correr in Venice in 2005. The MarteS is devoted to 18th century Venice: the art of Tiepolo, Ricci, Guardi, Canaletto, Rosalba Carriera dialogues with that of Pittoni, Diziani, Molinari, Bellucci, Fontebasso and many others. Luciano Sorlini entrusted his collection to the Foundation that he set up in 2000, and from that moment on, purchases took on a different significance: works of art were no longer chosen to furnish domestic spaces, but to enhance a cultural institution. It was for this reason that the collector wanted to secure masterpieces such as Giovanni Bellini's Madonna in Red, Christ Blessing between the Four Apostles by Vittore Carpaccio, and gold backgrounds by Gherardo Starnina and the Master of Panzano. 2007 saw the arrival of Giacomo Ceruti's Vecchia contadina (Old Peasant Woman), one of the most emblematic works by the greatest 18th-century painter in Lombardy, known by the pseudonym 'Pitocchetto'.