Vincent Van Gogh, The Lover (portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) (1888) Otterlo, Kröller-Müller Museum, The Netherlands. Photo Credti: The Art Newspaper.

News: Italy

Largest Van Gogh exhibition in the past 30 years opens in Italy

In the small town of Vicenza

by Archaeology Newsroom - Tuesday, 10 October 2017

An exhibition with Van Gogh works, the largest one since 1990, opened in Vicenza, Italy, a few days ago. The exhibition is the largest since the centenary of the artist’s death in 1990 and it includes 124 works, 86 drawings and 38 paintings.

Most of the works will come from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, while others will come from other institutions, such as Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Scotland and Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Fondation Corboud.

The site where the exhibition will be displayed is the Basilica Palladiana, an extraordinary building designed by Andrea Palladio in 1546. It was badly damaged during WW II bombings and five years ago it was restored, after many years of works. The exhibition will be on the upper level of the building, beneath a massive roof void.

The organisers of the exhibition are Linea d’ombra, an institution based in Treviso and founded by the art historian Marco Goldin in 1996. They tend to organise large-scale events that attract thousands of visitors with works borrowed from institutions abroad.

The last Van Gogh exhibition organised by Goldin was a monographic one in Brescia in 2008-2009, which included 85 works and was visited by hundreds of thousands people. This time, the exhibition is much larger and will run for 6 months, so many more visitors are expected in the small city of Vicenza. The event is sponsored by Segafredo Zanetti.