Civic Museum of the Capuchins

The Civic Museum of the Capuchins of Bagnacavallo is a municipal cultural institute, founded in 1976 in the spaces of the former convent of the Poor Clare Capuchin nuns of San Girolamo. The rich heritage preserved in the museum is divided into various sections: the Ancient Art Section collects valuable artistic testimonies from the 15th to the 19th century coming mostly from the territory, with works of great interest by artists such as Bartolomeo Ramenghi, Andrea Lilio, Felice Cignani and Ferraù Fenzoni. The itinerary of the Twentieth Century Section is also fascinating, where pictorial masterpieces by Remo Brindisi, Virgilio Guidi, Ernesto Treccani, Enzo Morelli and many others alternate with the valuable collection of sculptures "Vittorio dal Borgo", which collects works by, among others, Medardo Rosso , Giacomo Manzù, Tullio Figini and Giovanni Prini.

But the museum is now known nationally as one of the most active entities in Italy in the art graphics sector, thanks to the intense research, documentation and valorisation of the engraving language carried out consistently in recent years. The Prints Cabinet of the museum today preserves a very rich heritage, which with more than 13,000 preserved prints constitutes one of the most important Italian collections of contemporary engraving. On the exhibition front, in particular, the museum is pursuing an important line of investigation into the greatest international artists who have been able to express their greatness to the maximum through engraving: the major exhibition on Albrecht Dürer (2019) is only the latest in a series of successful exhibition projects that brought the art of Marc Chagall (2016), Francisco Goya (2017) and Max Klinger (2018) to the attention of the public. Furthermore, starting from 2015, the Civic Museum of the Capuchins has organized the "Giuseppe Maestri" engraving biennial, an artistic event of national importance which in its first two editions involved more than a hundred contemporary artists between the cities of Bagnacavallo and Ravenna.

Still on the art graphics front, the Capuchin Civic Museum recently inaugurated a highly innovative project based on digital technologies: the digital repertoire of contemporary Italian engraving. This tool collects and makes available the information sheets of more than 1,500 engravers and the catalog cards (with images) of almost 13,000 graphic works preserved in the Prints Cabinet. The database also makes other precious tools available for the representation of significant facts of the art of engraving in our country, such as the monitoring of the main artistic awards which have illustrated, and continue to illustrate, the trend lines of this artistic language so ancient and with great expressive potential. The digital repertoire collects information on these events, allowing not only to automatically reconstruct in the artists' files the memory of their presence at these important events or the prizes they received, but in fact also to reconstruct the recent history of Italian engraving and of its protagonists.