Collezione AUGUSTO E FRANCEScA Giovanardi
Augusto Giovanardi was born on June 23rd, 1904 in Montegridolfo, in the province of Rimini. His parents were Giuseppe Giovanardi, who was a doctor, and Virginia Marcucci. He completed his classical studies between San Marino and Pesaro and graduated cum laude in 1928 in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Bologna. In 1931, he qualified as professor of Bacteriology and, in 1934, Hygiene. From 1938 to 1942, he was an Associate Professor of Hygiene in Siena. He also taught Hygiene in Padua in 1942. In 1947, he then permanently moved to Milan, called to cover the chair of Hygiene and Bacteriology in the Directorate of the University Institute of Hygiene and the Institute of Virology, which he maintained until 1974.
With his school, he became a reference for Hygiene and Preventive Medicine in Italy. He was responsible for programming the Decentralized National Health System, establishing Local Health Units (first called U.S.L. then A.S.L.). He was one of the first to promote childhood vaccinations against the most common infectious diseases. Collaborating with Albert Sabin, he started the polio vaccination campaign in 1964, resulting in the defeat of polio in Italy.
During his brilliant career, he held many important positions in important international associations that worked against infectious diseases and within the Board of Health, receiving numerous awards for his scientific and cultural activities.
During his university years, he met Francesca Marzoli, who was born in Bologna on August 6th, 1905. Augusto and Francesca married in 1931. Soon after, their daughters Paola and Marta were born. August and Francesca were both cultured and curious and shared interests in literature, travel, music but, above all, in the visual arts. Their experience with the vivacious culture of Milan at the end of the 1940s stimulated in them the desire to build a collection that would then go on to include the most important protagonists of the Italian 20th century.
Any free time they had from work was spent in galleries in Milan, such as Gino Ghiringhelli’s Il Milione, Carlo Cardazzo’s Il Naviglio, Bruno Grossetti’s L’Annunciata, Ettore Gian Ferrari’s, Vittorio Barbaroux’s, the Finarte Auction House, run by Casimiro Porro and, at a later date, Massimo Di Carlo’s Galleria dello Scudo in Verona.
Augusto and Francesca encountered the most active and cultured collectors in the Italian post-war panorama in Milan, such as Lamberto Vitali, Gianni Mattioli, Antonio Mazzotta, Emilio and Maria Jesi, Riccardo and Magda Jucker, Antonio and Marieda Boschi Di Stefano, Giuseppe Vismara, Cesare Tosi, as well as the most accredited and brilliant Italian Art critics, including Marco Valsecchi, Franco Russoli, Palma Bucarelli, Luigi Carluccio, Giovanni Scheiwiller, Mercedes Garberi but, above all, they would often meet with their favorite artists: Giorgio Morandi, as well as his sisters, Carlo Carrà, Massimo Campigli, Osvaldo Licini, and Arturo Tosi.
For many years, they frenetically lent works of art to and collaborated with national and international museums, until their daughters, Marta and Paola, decided to form a nucleus of ninety works, which then became the Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi Collection. In 1997, these were put into long-term storage, first in the Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, then in the MART (Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto) in 2002 under the aegis of Gabriella Belli, where they remained until the end of 2015. The family once again came into full possession of the Giovanardi Collection in 2016.
Marta passed away in 1998, Francesca in 1999, and Augusto in 2006, at the age of almost 102. In 2006, Marta’s daughter, Cristiana, joined her aunt Paola in managing the family’s collection in which Paola’s children, Luca and Maddalena Rossi, and Cristiana’s son, Alvise Aspesi, also assiduously collaborate.
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Augusto Giovanardi started collecting contemporary art in 1947, when he purchased a still-life by Morandi at a charity sale held in the foyer of the Teatro alla Scala. The most important city institutions of art were still to reopen, and most 20th century works of art which had been transferred from private galleries to sites deemed safer and far from possible devastation were still to be returned.
Within a few years, the Giovanardi Collection had already reached such a level of quality that it was one of the three collections in Milan that celebrated the inauguration, in the presence of Italian President Giovanni Gronchi, of the new site of the Civic Gallery of Modern Art (both Modern and European) in Turin in 1959. In the exhibition, Capolavori di Arte Moderna nelle raccolte private (Masterpieces of Modern Art in Private Collections), curated by Marco Valsecchi, the appreciative public – finding itself projected into an engaging and hopeful future – was able to admired masterpieces owned by Tosi, Mattioli, and Giovanardi.
The Collection consisted of ninety paintings by twelve 20th-century artists. Their names also aroused a strong attraction among other refined collectors in Milan. These established admirers of the visual arts intended to rebuild a new national identity through culture. The great names of Italian Art collecting in the 20th century were the ones to thank for the compressed, but fluid contiguity found among the protagonists of various trends and aspirations. Along with Rosai, Carrà was also embraced, while Mafai was accompanied by Sironi... and Licini. So antithetical to everyone, also because of exquisitely formal (but actually poetic) themes, he did not disapprove of the group, on the contrary, he glorified it, since it ensured a top-quality order to our abstraction, even at the beginning of the “Sarfatti Era”. The extraordinary collectors who worked in post-war Milan really understood the uniqueness of our artistic style, of our rutilant complementarity.
And along this specific leitmotiv unfolded the inexhaustible research of Augusto Giovanardi who, with his wife Francesca, never missed an appointment among those that formed an “existence”: the arrival of new works of art at the Galleria del Milione, the visits of artists or collectors to their home in Milan in Via Dei Loredan, a trip to meet Morandi in Bologna or Licini in Monte Vidon Corrado, an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale or at the PAC (Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea - Contemporary Art Pavilion) to animatedly debate with Mercedes Garberi (untiring Director of the Civic Center of Modern and Contemporary Art of the City of Milan), an event where city officials or the major representatives of the art critics world collaborated. And besides all this: going to concerts at La Scala theatre and the Conservatory, traveling to faraway lands in the East and West with their daughters and grandchildren, as well as attending seminars, conferences, and important meetings with scientists and cultured men and women in Italy and abroad.
At first, the Collection impetuously rode the enthusiasm of the years of the “economic boom”. The purpose of composing what “was certainly necessary” was very precise. From the end of the 1970s, its course was defined by accurately selecting works of art, with some rare improvement in the exchange of works.
The lives of Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi were rich and fulfilling, not just because they were undoubtedly favored by a difficult but exciting period in Italian history, but also because today they have given us all hope in the edifying virtue of Art and Culture, without which no existence would make sense. The Giovanardi Collection gives back to those who try to understand what we might be, despite adversity. The sense of our identity and the courage to face the uncertainties of these very different times.
