Pinacoteca Gianni Bellini

At the top of Sarnico's historic centre, inside the oldest part of a fifteenth-century palazzo that once housed a cloistered convent, the Pinacoteca Gianni Bellini shows the collection a local priest assembled and left to his town: more than 150 paintings, sculptures and furnishings from across Europe.

Why it matters

A mid-sized lake town holding a serious collection of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century painting is unusual, and Sarnico owes it to one man: don Gianni Bellini, a Sarnico priest and collector who described himself as seized by the desire to own paintings, sculptures and furnishings bought from dealers and private collectors, and who donated the whole ensemble to his community. Since 2004 the collection has occupied the oldest part of Palazzo Gervasoni, a fifteenth-century building that had been a clausura convent in the sixteenth century, restored over about six years before the opening. The Bergamo destination portal now lists the museum under its civic name, Museo Civico d'Arte e del Territorio Gianni Bellini, and it remains the reference art collection of the southern lake.

What to notice

• The building itself: columns and arches marking the old convent cloister, floors in the typical Sarnico stone, and a suspended walkway system topped by a large skylight that floods the top floor with daylight.
• Palma il Giovane's Compianto sul Cristo morto, the Venetian landmark of the collection, and the Allegoria del tempo by Legnanino.
• The Prometeo from the workshop of Luca Giordano, with paintings by Alessandro Magnasco, Antonio Cifrondi, Carlo Ceresa, Francesco Cairo and Nicolas Régnier around it.
• The range beyond Italy: the official museum page records Flemish, French, Spanish and German works, alongside Greco-Venetian Byzantine pieces.
• The non-painting holdings — carved wooden and marble statues, four processional crucifixes of note, and period furniture.
• The upper floor's change of register: landscapes, still lifes and architectural capricci, after the sacred and profane figure painting of the lower levels.

Context and history

The sequence that produced the museum ran backwards from the collection to the building. Don Gianni Bellini gathered his works across decades of buying; towards the end of the 1990s the Gervasoni family, whose ancestors had given the palazzo its name, ceded the property to the town administration; the restoration that followed lasted about six years and respected the building's plan and grey stone, reinforcing the suspended walkways and replacing the roof with a skylight. The Pinacoteca opened in 2004. Hang follows schools and themes: the Bergamo portal describes works arranged by Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Tuscan, Roman and Neapolitan painting, with sacred and profane subjects below and view-painting, capricci and still life above. A 2009 catalogue of the paintings by D. Dotti is the published reference for the collection.