The De Martiis Collection
Excerpt from patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it
The De Martiis Family Collection, entirely donated to the Municipality of Cividale del Friuli through a generous act of patronage, is the result of a personal collection of artworks by Giancarlo De Martiis. It is currently displayed in the splendid setting of Palazzo de Nordis; the artistic journey unfolds from the late nineteenth century to the present day.
The collecting criterion that distinguished De Martiis's choices is the reflection of a passion cultivated over the years, the result of a pure aesthetic and emotional choice built independently through acquisitions mainly from auction houses and private galleries.
The first works
Started in July 1980 when De Martiis purchased the canvas by Karel Appel Testa at the Galleria Centro Internazionale di Milano, the collection begins chronologically with a small nucleus of late 19th-century Impressionist works: a pleasant landscape by Eugéne Boudin, Plage a Deauvile, from 1885, the two pastels by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec Femme au courset and Femme qui tire son bas from the mid-1890s, the Petite scene rurale by Soutine from 1926-27.
A particular taste is noted in De Martiis in collecting paintings where the human figure is present, often nude and rendered in a deforming and strongly expressive style, as in the two large canvases by Karel Appel Nudo n. 17 and Nudo n. 18 from 1994, energetic and irreverent compositions of great expressive force, or by the Austrian painter Alfred Kornberger Nudo sul divano from 1994 and Nudo colorato con gambe divaricate from 1998, or as part of the substantial nucleus of drawings by Eduard Pignon from the 1970s, purchased in 2017 at the Galleria De Cilla di Udine, including the monumental female nude Nu blanc or the other Nu au parasol.
The role of Italian art in the late ’900
In the De Martiis collection, there is a general attention to some famous exponents of Italian art from the second half of the 20th century who have turned their expressive form towards the Informal: Emilio Vedova, Mario Di Iorio, the Venetian spatialist Virgilio Guidi, Tancredi Parmeggiani, but also Afro Basaldella, Zoran Music, Giuseppe Santomaso, and Mario Sironi
The entire exhibited collection is the image of the personal and unique tastes of the visionary collector as he himself stated:
“All my choices were dictated solely by my taste and the pleasure I felt in observing the works. For me, contemplating these paintings was above all a moment of relaxation, an emotional pause for the spirit after an intense working day.”
The Palazzo
It overlooks piazzetta de Portis and via Carlo Alberto.
The facade on piazzetta de Portis, with its Renaissance design, features two different heights corresponding to two contiguous bodies. The lower building has stone-framed openings with shaped cornices on the first floor; on the second floor, the openings are smaller and have a lowered arch. The dividing wall with the second body is visible on the ground floor. The building also has an entrance on via Carlo Alberto, provided by a Gothic portal leading to an internal garden. The building facing it has the same characteristics as the facade on piazzetta de Portis. On the second floor of the corner building, there is a large hall frescoed by Francesco Chiarottini.
The walls are made of squared stone; the floors are wooden; the openings are stone-framed; the roof structure is wooden.
The building dates back to the 13th-14th century. During the 19th century, with the fragmentation of ownership, there was a proliferation of new accesses to individual units, with the creation of balconies, added bodies, and stairwells.
Excerpt from patrimonioculturale.regione.fvg.it
