Museo Guelfo

Fabriano's museum of Guelfo, the fabrianese surrealist Gaetano Ulisse Bianchini, pairs the artist's own paintings, glass sculpture and stained glass with a graphics collection reaching from Dada to De Chirico. Opened in 2018 beside the R. Sassi library, it grew from a family donation to the city.

Why it matters

Every other museum in Fabriano looks backward at medieval craft; the Museo Guelfo connects the city to the twentieth century. It honours Guelfo, born Gaetano Ulisse Bianchini in Fabriano in 1937 and died in 1997, whom the official portal describes as one of the most eclectic and appreciated figures of contemporary surrealism. The museum opened in October 2018, when the collection assembled by Guelfo and his sister Marisa Bianchini was donated to the city, and it sits within the civic museums circuit presented by the Pinacoteca Civica Bruno Molajoli. For a town whose fame rests on handmade paper, a museum of drawing and printmaking is not a stray addition but a continuation: the official portal reads the donation as homage to Fabriano's paper and graphic tradition.

What to notice

The museum occupies two rooms, and each has a distinct character. The first is devoted to Guelfo himself: paintings in a range of techniques alongside sculptures in fused glass and bronze, and stained glass, the medium the portal calls especially suited to his imagination. He designed windows for the church of San Giuseppe Lavoratore and for Fabriano's own cathedral, where his 1985 window of San Venanzio can still be seen; the official page records that Marc Chagall admired these Italian stained-glass works. The second room turns to the collection: a graphics survey running from Impressionism to the present, assembled through Guelfo's European travels among Dadaist and Surrealist artists. The collection includes works by Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Jean Cocteau, André Masson and Man Ray, as well as drawings, engravings and works by Giorgio De Chirico, Guelfo's longtime collaborator, documented in the volume Tic - Guelfo e Giorgio De Chirico. The Guelfo and Marisa Bianchini collection also holds sheets by Chagall, Afro and Guttuso.

Context and history

Guelfo left his mark in engraving, drawing, watercolour, oil, fused glass and sculpture, and his European career brought him into contact with Max Ernst and Man Ray, as the official portal records. The art historian Giuliano Briganti judged him one of the best Italian graphic artists, and De Chirico praised his capacity to build fantastical worlds. After his death, his sister Marisa Bianchini kept the collection together and gave it to Fabriano; the exhibition rooms, next to the R. Sassi multimedia library, were inaugurated in October 2018. Within the city's museum network, the Guelfo is grouped with the Oratorio della Carità and linked institutionally with the paper museum, the pinacoteca and the theatre.