Pinacoteca Matteo Olivero

Saluzzo's civic art gallery is dedicated to Matteo Olivero, the divisionist painter from the Maira valley whose broken-colour canvases appeared alongside other Italian divisionists at the Venice Biennali. Its collection includes about one hundred of his works in the fifteenth-century Old Town Hall.

Why it matters

Divisionism — the Italian adaptation of dot-and-stroke broken colour — is usually encountered in Milan and Turin. Saluzzo's gallery makes a distinctive argument: that the movement's Alpine frontier produced a painter of real consequence. Matteo Olivero (1879–1932), born in Acceglio at the head of the Maira valley, exhibited at the Venice Biennali and pursued divisionist technique from social realism into the 1920s. Installed in 2013 in the Salone of the Antico Palazzo Comunale, the gallery holds paintings, drawings and sculptures arranged in four thematic sections, tracing the artist's career.

What to notice

The four thematic sections trace Olivero's development from social realism, including depictions of mountain communities, to later work of the 1920s. His divisionist technique has a dense, textile-like surface shaped by mountain light. The gallery occupies the second floor of the Old Town Hall; the first-floor salone has a fifteenth-century coffered ceiling painted with mythological, symbolic and heraldic motifs. Restoration also revealed the building's loggiato and terracotta façade decorations.

Context and history

The building is older and more storied than the collection it now shelters. The Antico Palazzo Comunale was built between 1440 and 1462, and served the commune as its town hall for centuries; its ground-floor loggia and cotto decorations survive intact. The pinacoteca is named for Matteo Olivero, born in 1879 in Acceglio, who took the divisionist method learned in the metropolitan art world back to his native mountains and exhibited nationally, including at the Venice Biennali. His works are housed in the palace's second-floor gallery. The first-floor salone, once used by the Congregazioni del Marchesato, retains its fifteenth-century coffered ceiling. The gallery forms part of the Mu.Sa civic museum system alongside Casa Cavassa and La Castiglia. The adjacent civic tower, begun in 1462, completes the monumental ensemble at the commune's former political centre.