The Department of Drawings and Prints at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna preserves over nine thousand drawings, received through numerous donations and acquisitions that have expanded the heritage of drawings that already belonged to the Istituto delle Scienze with the fonds of the Accademia di Belle Arti, founded in 1802, and with the heritage gradually acquired by the Pinacoteca Nazionale itself.
According to tradition, the earliest donation includes some studies by Agostino Carracci for the altarpiece with theLast Communion of St Jerome, made for the church of San Girolamo della Certosa and today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna.
In addition to the 1776 donation of drawings by the Oratorian father Urbano Savorgnan, the group of sheets from the Napoleonic suppressions belongs to the 18th-century acquisitions. In particular, 106 drawings arrived from the convent of San Giovanni in Monte, including works currently attributed to Giorgio Vasari, Orazio Samacchini, Giacomo Cavedone and Francesco Trevisani. In addition to this nucleus was the 1802 bequest by Gregorio Casali with works by Ubaldo Gandolfi and Mauro Tesi, and the purchase in 1871 of five cartoons by Andrea Appiani, four of which can be traced back to the destroyed frescoes in the Sala della Lanterna in the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
There are numerous acquisitions and donations dating back to the first half of the 20th century, promoted by Pinacoteca directors Anacleto Guadagnini and Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri in particular. These include the purchase in 1900 of 15 drawings from Giulio Cesare Pietra (14 of which can be attributed to Donato Creti) and 114 drawings already in the collection of the artist Giacomo Zampa, purchased in 1915 from Vittorio Modena, with Bolognese drawings from the 17th and 18th centuries as well as works by Zampa himself.
In 1916, a booklet was purchased from the parish priest of Santa Cecilia della Croara, Don Paride Guglielmo Lucarotti, containing 60 drawings, mainly from the 18th-century Bolognese school, with pages by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Lorenzo Pasinelli, Vittorio Maria Bigari, the Gandolfi and Filippo Pedrini. In addition to these, 49 drawings were purchased from Giovanni Piancastelli, including works by Pietro Faccini, Carlo Cignani, Marcantonio Franceschini, Giovanni Antonio Burrini, Antonio Gionima and again the Gandolfi.
Beginning in 1916, but staggered in various stages over the years that followed, was the acquisition of drawings from Giuseppe Ranuzzi de’ Bianchi. In 1917, the collection of Orazio Sampietro of Treviglio was purchased. This included, in addition to fifty drawings of the Bolognese school of the 17th and 18th century, six notebooks with scenographic studies by the brothers Bernardino, Fabrizio and Giovanni Antonio Galliari.
Between 1917 and 1918, the works collected by the multifaceted architect Raffaele Faccioli were bequeathed to the gallery through his heirs, including a substantial number of photographs, as well as prints, drawings and Faccioli’s own hand-written notebooks.
Among the donations of ancient works is the bequest of Count Agostino Sieri Pepoli, which came to the Pinacoteca in 1919-1920 and included 16th-century works (including a drawing by Amico Aspertini), 17th-century sheets of paper and, above all, 18th-century quadrature and scenography drawings.
Between 1920 and 1932, some important groups by artists working in Bologna in the 19th and early 20th century arrived in the Pinacoteca. In addition to the acquisition of drawings by Luigi Samoggia, Luigi Busi, Coriolano Vighi and Riccardo Marchesini, there were also the acquisition of works by Luigi Serra and the donation, by his brothers, of works by Antonio Muzzi.
Other drawings, mostly as individual works, have arrived in the Pinacoteca in recent decades: the drawing with Ludovico Carracci’s St Dominic donated by Vitale Bloch in 1959, a book of drawings by Felice Giani acquired in 1980, the Magdalene attributed to Annibale Carracci purchased in 2001, and Alessandro Tiarini’s preparatory drawing for the painting in the Pinacoteca depicting St John the Baptist Rebuking Herod, purchased in 2008.
Between 2011 and 2013, the Società di Santa Cecilia donated three drawings: The Annunciation by Angela Teresa Muratori, Li cinque sentimenti alla moda [The Five Fashionable Sentiments] by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli and L’allegoria della guerra [The Allegory of War] by Felice Giani.
The collection of prints in the Department of Drawings and Prints of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna is made up of collectors’ fonds that came to the Istituto delle Scienze, later the Regia Università, starting from the first half of the 18th century. In 1881, these fonds became part of the patrimony of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, whose annexed Pinacoteca became autonomous in 1882.
The oldest group of works can be traced back to the 1715 donation by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, which was followed by donations in 1751 and 1756 by Pope Benedict XIV Lambertini and a vast collection that once belonged to the Bolognese artist Pier Francesco Cavazza.
Having acquired the collection of printed portraits of the apothecary Ubaldo Zanetti in 1780, together with books and manuscripts still kept at the University Library of Bologna, and the gift of the Oratorian father Urbano Savorgnan in 1776, the most significant contribution at the end of the 18th century was the purchase in 1789 of the collection of prints of Count Ludovico Aurelio Savioli, sold to the Science Institute by his father, the poet Ludovico Vittorio Savioli. With this collection of 5408 prints, important examples of the 15th and 16th-century Northern European School, in particular, came to the Pinacoteca.
The majority of the prints belonging to these donations, with the exception of those of Ubaldo Zanetti, were organised in the second half of the 18th century (starting with an initial group of 50 volumes that had been bound at the behest of Pope Benedict XIV in 1751) into 81 large-format volumes, making up the so-called “large collection”. Instead, in addition to the group donated by Pope Lambertini in 1756, there is the group of volumes of the so-called “small collection”, which is mainly iconographic in nature.
From the 81 volumes still preserved in the Department of Drawings and Prints, the most important pieces were extracted during a rearrangement of the collection at the end of the 19th century and are now preserved loose.
Of the 19th-century groups, 240 pieces from the suppressed School of Engraving of the Accademia di Belle Arti should be noted. These were mostly collected on the initiative of the artist Francesco Rosaspina (who also left the Institute prints of his own work), and the heterogeneous, but mainly didactic, pontifical chalcography pieces sent by Pius IX, registered in 1874 at the Accademia di Belle Arti as 950 pieces, including 12,000 plates. Several other donations arrived in the 20th century, including that of the engraver and bibliophile Spagnoli, with a wealth of Flemish and French works. The collection was significantly expanded by the State’s purchase in 2002 of the collection of prints of the Bolognese collector Luciana Tabarroni, dedicated to 20th-century European graphics. Among the 1948 sheets are invaluable examples by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio Morandi, Stanley William Heyter and Francis Bacon.