Sonnabend Collection Mantova

One of the twentieth century's great private collections now lives in a thirteenth-century hall of justice. The Sonnabend Collection Mantua fills Palazzo della Ragione on Piazza delle Erbe with Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, Koons and Kiefer, placing American Pop Art and its Italian counterparts inside the most medieval room in the city.

Why it matters

Ileana Sonnabend (1914–2007), with her husband Michael Sonnabend and their adopted son Antonio Homem, built one of the most consequential collections of the last century, and through her galleries in Paris and New York she shipped American art to Europe and European art to America. The municipal project that brought her collection to Mantua, run with the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Marsilio Arte, installed a permanent contemporary museum across eleven rooms of the restored Palazzo della Ragione. For a mid-sized Italian city this is an exceptional acquisition: the works on show are not loans visiting for a season but the core of a collection that defined the post-war avant-garde, presented permanently in the middle of a medieval town.

What to notice

The hang reflects Sonnabend's eye rather than a strict art-historical sequence. The collection includes Roy Lichtenstein's Little Aloha (1962), Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup canvas (1962), Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons's Wild Boy and Puppy (1988), Anselm Kiefer's Wege der Weltweisheit, Gilbert & George's Berries (1985) and John Baldessari's Grimm's Fairy Tales piece, with Jim Dine, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann also represented. The Italian dialogue matters too: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Schifano — his Tempo Moderno of 1962 — anchor the collection's European half. Twelfth-century battle-scene frescoes and figures signed by the thirteenth-century painter Grisopolo appear on the walls alongside the Pop canvases.

Context and history

The building's biography explains the encounter. Palazzo della Ragione served Mantua as its communal seat and hall of justice from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onward, was given its clock tower in 1472–73, was baroque-ified in 1700 and then stripped back to its medieval lines by Aldo Andreani in the early twentieth century. The 2012 Emilia earthquake forced a long structural closure, and the recovery project became the vehicle for the Sonnabend museum, whose permanent installation turned the great hall into the city's flagship modern-art venue. The museum is a partnership between the Comune di Mantova, the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Marsilio Arte.