Following the success of the exhibition “Giulio Cesare and Francesco Bedeschini. Drawing and Invention in L’Aquila in the Seventeenth Century,” open from December 1, 2023, to March 3, 2024, the National Museum of Abruzzo offers the public a new temporary exhibition in the Franciscan Room. The exhibition features 14 drawings donated by a private collector, which interact with the seven canvases by Giulio Cesare and Francesco Bedeschini from the MuNDA collections.
The new exhibition project was designed to accommodate part of the significant private donation made in memory of Carmela Gaeta and to allow some of the works in the “Franciscan Room” to undergo extraordinary maintenance, revision, and restoration in preparation for their future display in the restored spaces of the sixteenth-century Castle, the original home of the National Museum of Abruzzo.
The tour begins with the series of the four patron saints of the city of L’Aquila, traditionally attributed to Giulio Cesare Bedeschini, among the painter’s most famous and successful creations. It continues with Giulio Cesare Bedeschini’s drawing of the Madonna del Carmine with Saints Charles Borromeo, Francis of Assisi, Mark the Evangelist, Anthony of Padua, and Catherine of Alexandria, previously exhibited in the “New Acquisitions” exhibition, which features paper cuttings glued together using the customary “cut & paste” technique. Visitors can admire Giulio Cesare’s Madonna del Rosario, which entered the collections of the National Museum of Abruzzo in 1969, as well as the squared drawing on cerulean paper of Saint James the Greater, preparatory for the altarpiece displayed nearby and originating from the altar of the Burri family in the church of San Domenico.
The role played by his son Francesco Bedeschini, the true father of L’Aquila’s Baroque style, a seventeenth-century artist in the full sense of the term, inventor of furniture, fireplaces, bedsteads, majolica, and clothing, but also and above all designer of stone, stucco, and wood decorations, is evident through the six designs for a new altar/repository of Saint Peter Celestine in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio from the sketchbook, which constitute the studies, each a mirror image, for the new repository of the relics of Saint Peter Celestine in Santa Maria di Collemaggio in L’Aquila, and the designs for the stucco decorations of the rooms of the Lords of the Magistrate in L’Aquila, the only three known drawings for the missing stucco decoration of the rooms of the “fourth” of the Lords of the Magistrate in L’Aquila’s Palazzo Pubblico, executed by Giuseppe Del Grande and his brothers between 1688 and 1694 based on a design by Francesco Bedeschini.
The redesigned room concludes with a painting depicting the French bishop saint Trophimus of Arles and a series of Holy Virgins and Martyrs, martyred between the end of the 3rd century and the end of the 4th century. This series was conceived by Francesco Bedeschini, perhaps to illustrate the manuscript presentation copy of a legend of holy virgins and martyrs. The visit to the room is further enhanced by three 3D tactile models to explore, supported by a description sheet accessible via QR code or a Braille volume. These models relate to two of L’Aquila’s four patron saints and St. James the Greater, as well as two unmissable videos created for the exhibition “Giulio Cesare and Francesco Bedeschini. Drawing and Invention in L’Aquila in the Seventeenth Century” by Altair4 Multimedia.
