Among the most interesting objects in the Chini collection we find the Corinthian helmet from the second half of the 6th century BC, made of cast bronze and decorated with engraving. The shape and decoration of the work can be linked to the Apulian area: it probably comes from the Gioia del Colle area, where an aristocratic warrior class had attacked since the Archaic age. You can see a rich and refined decoration that follows the workmanship of the entire object: a marked stroke to represent eyebrows and edges, a much finer one for the other figurative elements.

The Flight into Egypt was commissioned to Jacopo Da Ponte by the rector of the Bassano church of San Girolamo. The canvas constitutes the first draft of a subject replicated several times by the artist and taken up here in the moment following the appearance of the angel announcing the divine will in a dream to St. Joseph. The Holy Family escapes from the murderous fury of Herod immersed in a frozen dawn, accompanied by three shepherds with provisions. The charm is enclosed in the large landscape with the apple tree in the center behind the Virgin, the cherry tree and the oak tree on the left, the flowers in the foreground, enhanced in their symbolic power as a prelude to the incarnation of Christ. The charm of the painting, acclaimed by all literature, lies in the essentiality of the story and in the crystalline purity of the light, which illuminates the characters from the back.

The panel of the Madonna and Child comes from the Bassano monastery dedicated to Santa Maria della Misericordia, then in the seventeenth century to the Blessed Giovanna Bonomo. Michele Giambono, a pupil of Jacobello del Fiore, was one of the most lively interpreters in Veneto of Gentile da Fabriano's lesson. The gold background, from which the typical reddish bolus preparation clearly emerges, does not preclude the Madonna and Child from communicating to the observer a spirit of intimate naturalness perceptible in the play of the hands, in the bright color of the complexions, but above all in the intense exchange of glances between mother and child.

Painted in tempera on wood before 1332 for the nearby church of San Francesco, the large stationary cross of Guariento di Arpo was commissioned by the noblewoman Bona Maria dei Buvolini. The woman is represented at the foot of the cross in an attitude of prayer: the inscription compares her to Helen, mother of the Emperor Constantine who found the true cross of Christ. The work is among the very few by the artist to be signed "Guarientus pinxit" at the foot of the cross. Model is the Giotto cross of the Scrovegni Chapel which the artist looks at in the first period of his activity.

The work was created for the altar of the Testa di San Giovanni family, in the church of San Francesco in Bassano. The figure of the Baptist, the head thrown back, the chest projected forward, comes from a combination of different angles that requires a comparison with the solutions imported to Venice by Paolo Veronese in the decoration of the ceilings. Veronesian is also the layout of the landscape, where the refined variations of browns of the trunks and rocks are welded to the cold blue, streaked with white of the sky with a skilful decorative effect all over the surface, unusual for Bassano.

The scene is laid out between two wings of architectural ruins, with the characteristic tow roof, beyond which the landscape opens up in tune with a cold light. The lowered point of view captures the sacred event closely: the Virgin is depicted in the act of discovering the Child sleeping curled up. On the left, behind San Giuseppe asleep, the Saints Vittore and Corona, co-patrons of the church of San Giuseppe, are present, and a third figure appears, certainly a portrait due to its evident physiognomic characteristics. On the right, the group of shepherds with their animals, copied from the real newspaper. The light coming from the hole in the sky, where the angels soar in flight, and from the cloudy horizon unifies the composition giving a sense of classic solemnity.

This painting was made for the church of Santa Caterina in Bassano. San Martino appears in traditional iconography with the poor man in the foreground with his back to the viewer. The saint, depicted with armor and riding a steed with a mane whitened by the light, is giving a cloak to the poor. On the bottom of the canvas a bright reddish gash opens in the distance above Golgotha with the three crosses, while the lower left corner is occupied by the figure of Saint Anthony the Abbot, with the great book of the rule on his knees, another book , flames and a pig at the feet.

In addition to that of the penitent Magdalene, the Civic Museum of Bassano del Grappa houses the precious sketch of the Three Graces. The small sculptural group of 1812, about 25 centimeters high, reveals the fingerprints of the master in several places, now kept in a high-security case and never released from the Civic Museums of Bassano, except for a brief exhibition held in Possagno, in the same year in which it was purchased, in 2003. In the sketch the artist experiences a very different relationship between the three bodies of the Graces compared to the executive model of the marble versions.

In 1799 the French moved to Paris, among the many Italian works of art, also the Medici Venus of the Uffizi, a Roman copy of Praxiteles' Aphrodite Cnidia. Antonio Canova was thus commissioned to make a copy of the work to replace the original. The plaster model is kept in the hall of the Civic Museum of Bassano del Grappa. The Venus Italica, built in 1812, was sculpted in marble with the inscription "stolen by the Emperor" on it, and placed inside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Civic Museum of Bassano del Grappa preserves two of the five plaster casts made by Antonio Canova for the sculpture of the penitent Magdalene as well as a drawing of the same and the precious terracotta sketch. The saint is represented kneeling on the ground, with her head resting on her chest towards her left shoulder, her arms outstretched and her back arched forward as she begs for her own redemption, her distraught gaze concentrated on the palms of her open hands destined to welcome a cross. . The bent posture and the imploring gesture illustrate the psychological fragility of the character. Next to the woman, a skull recalls the earthly vanity that has reduced her to this compassionate state, from which she now tries to redeem herself through prayer. The plaster cast represents a preparatory model for the marble statue that Canova originally planned to sell to Count Tiberio Roberti of Bassano del Grappa.

In this monochrome, which takes up a tempera preserved in Possagno, the dance theme develops as a frieze. The artist eliminates the thin strip of ground that in tempera acts as a laying surface, suspending the dancers in the air. The composition is elegant and highly decorative. The fluctuating veil dresses give the dancers a lightness of butterflies, highlighting the slender body shapes.

The conspicuous Canova heritage preserved at the Civic Museum of Bassano del Grappa is completed with 10 large-format sketchbooks and 8 smaller notebooks for a total of 1890 sheets of extraordinary artistic value. Among these, the EB Album preserves the very precious sketch of the famous sculpture of Cupid and Psyche. The greasy pencil drawing already testifies to the compositional skill that Canova would later translate into marble, with the bodies of the two figures crossing in two soft diagonals, giving balance to the composition.

The large head exhibited in the Canovian hall of the Civic Museum, restored in 2004, is one of the many fragments of the colossal horse that came to Bassano in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to the testamentary bequest of Antonio Canova's brother in law, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Sartori Canova. Dissected in 1968 and kept in storage since then, the colossus was the protagonist and starting point of Atelier Canova, a project launched in 2016 by the Civic Museums in collaboration with the Factum Foundation, which has finally made an important part of the city's heritage accessible to the public: the virtual restoration of the Colossal Horse, the realization of the facsimile of two sketchbooks and the terracotta sketch of the Three Graces. The results of these researches gave birth to Antonio Canova. Atelier, volume edited by Marsilio edited by Chiara Casarin in collaboration with Adam Lowe.

The painting highlights the female figure who is both an artist and a pictorial subject here. The first version of the work, executed by the artist in 1610 at the age of 17, which is now part of the Graf von Schönborn Collection of Pommersfelden in Germany, was followed in 1622 by the one belonging to the English collection of Burgley House, the one dating back to 1649 of the Moravska Galerie in Brno and the one received by the Civic Museum of Bassano in 1973 thanks to the legacy of Mary Dirouhi Megrditchran widow Agostinelli. Recent insights specify the realization of the painting in the Neapolitan atelier of Artemisia around 1650.

It is a precious unfinished early sketch, where the red bole preparation used by the artist typical of eighteenth-century Venetian art emerges with great evidence. The classical spirit taken up by Paolo Veronese and the chiaroscuro contrast of Piazzetta matrix confirm for the work a dating to the "dark" period of Tiepolo, datable to around 1725, not far from the decoration of Palazzo Sandi in Venice.

The work is presented as one of Magnasco's masterpieces. A crowded and sumptuous banquet of friars is taking place inside a huge building with three naves. The scene is viewed from an elevated point of view, from a bird's eye view. In the central nave, the friars, tiny compared to the grandiose architecture, arrange themselves along three large rows of tables that develop in depth and converge in perspective towards the back.

The subject is Francesco Roberti, son of Count Tiberio and brother of the better known Roberto Roberti. The size of the portrait and the quick and lean drafting make it suitable for a family environment. Although it is a youthful work of the master linked to the Venetian and Roman experience, where he knows the Canova environment and comes into contact with the Roberti counts, the portrait strikes for the sure immediacy, the communicative ability and the introspection of the subject.

Bortolo Sacchi was a leading exponent of the Venetian current of magical realism in its declination linked to the environment of Ca 'Pesaro, a meeting place for the painters of his generation; his painting is also affected by the influence of German expressionism for his training at the Munich Academy. In this particular interpretation of the theme of the set figure, exhibited at the International Biennale of Art of the City of Venice in 1928, the cornerstones of his painting are found: the mystery of a suspended time, the restlessness given by a strange silence that pervades him. space, the study of volumes and details.