The Collection

Begun more than fifty years ago, the Carlon collection is an eclectic assortment that has grown without limits as to period or genre. It includes paintings, sculptures, engravings, etchings, drawings, miniatures, and old books, as well as maiolica, bronzes, ivories, practical objects such as furnishings, and decorative objects dating from antiquity to the present day. It is characterised by a good balance between modern and contemporary art but there are also paintings, gold ground paintings, and sculptures from the early centuries of the second millennium. The collection includes many significant nuclei bearing witness to the organic nature of the acquisitions, as seen in the many works of Veronese painting from the 15th to the late 18th century and the works of Italian Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, Surrealism, and abstract painting from the second half of the 20th century.

The strong interest in the art history of Verona is a strongly characterising element of the collection of old art, which boasts an impressive compendium of local art history with masterpieces by such luminaries as Altichiero and Liberale da Verona, Nicolò Giolfino, Zenone Veronese, Bonifacio de’ Pitati, Antonio and Giovanni Badile, Felice Brusasorci, Jacopo Ligozzi, Alessandro Turchi, Marc’Antonio Bassetti, Antonio Balestra, Giambettino Cignaroli, and others.

An itinerary rich in extraordinary works documents Italian art from the 1900s and beyond. The richness and quality of the Carlon collection are also ensured by the works of the most important protagonists of the historical avant-garde movements in Italy and elsewhere, including Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, as well as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Felice Casorati, and Giorgio Morandi alongside René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. The list continues with Afro, Emilio Vedova, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Tancredi, Gino De Dominicis, and Piero Manzoni, just to name some of the principal artists represented in the collection.

The collection also features a great number of rare art objects, precious exemplars of applied arts, as well as practical, everyday objects from Europe and also the Far East. In this it exemplifies an openness to all art, guided by a concept lying somewhere between the Wunderkammer of old and the Gesamtkunstwerk, seeking a perfect, ideal synthesis of the arts: painting, sculpture, decoration, and architecture.