Book launch
Venezia Settecento. Studi in memoria di Alessandro Bettagno
edited by Bozena Anna Kowalczyk
Silvana Editoriale, 2015

The book will be presented by Pierre Rosenberg, French Academy, President Emeritus, Musée du Louvre

2 December 2015, 5 pm
Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Sala Barbantini

 

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Alessandro Bettagno was born in Verona and lived in Venice from the first post-war period onwards. An illustrious art historian and one of the most authoritative cultural figures in Italy, he was also an organiser of major cultural events. For fifty years he was involved in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Art History, first as an assistant to Giuseppe Fiocco from its foundation in 1954, then as director from 1989 to 2002. Thanks to his indefatigable intelligent work and his considerable international reputation, the Institute played a leading role in Venetian culture in the last decades of the 20th century.

From 1972 Alessandro Bettagno held the chair in history of art in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice; in the 1980s he was president of the Ateneo Veneto and from 1998, president of the Istituto Nazionale di Storia dell’Arte in Rome.

The innovative exhibitions of drawings on San Giorgio that he curated from the 1950s on were important annual dates for specialists and an informed public. Bettagno’s unforgettable exhibitions include those devoted to Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, Antonio Pellegrini, Giambattista Piazzetta, Giambattista Piranesi, Bernardo Bellotto and Canaletto. His studies conducted for the exhibitions were characterised by his typical academic rigour and clearly presented information and today are still the basis for all thinking on the Venetian Settecento.

Published with the participation of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and edited by  Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, the book commemorates the life and work of Alessandro Bettagno in essays by authoritative scholars of 18th-century Venetian art from “Amigoni to Zanetti”.