Officina Emiliana (The Emilia Workshop)

The Banca Popolare dell'Emilia began its art collection, of which a significant selection is on display here, unobtrusively, with the acquisition of a small number of decorative paintings. However, coming, as it did, at a moment when the idea of banks engaging in art collecting was being promoted by the recognized institutes as a new and efficient way of putting Italian artistic heritage to good use, the collection was very quickly developed into major cultural undertaking. It was developed according to a coherent model, with carefully chosen acquisitions, which allowed it, in the longer term, to include representative works from all the variety produced in the areas in which the Bank had historically operated.

The suggestions of the scholar Carlo Volpe helped particularly to orientate the collection in this direction, brought from a culture of ‘connoisseurship’ to collect and value the Institute’s potential.
Volpe was a revered teacher at the University of Bologna, a well-known specialist in the difficult field of the Early Renaissance and expert in many other areas of art-historical research.
Through him, the Bank was also able to profit from the help of Roberto Longhi, one of his most brilliant and versatile students: the title chosen for this small but select exhibition, The Emilia Workshop, aims to re-echo in a non banal way one of the latter's most famous works, the Ferrara Workshop, which was published in 1934, continues to be a model for art-historical historiography in Italy and abroad.

After Volpe, the work of continuing the collection was entrusted, as a mark of continuity with his teaching, to Daniele Benati and Lucia Peruzzi, who not only continued to enlarge the collection, but also created a catalogue of it, which was sent to print for the first time in 1987.

The bank has already for some years been opening its collection to the public, more recently in collaboration with the local branch of the FAI - the Fund for the Italian Environment - a practice which allows the pictures to be seen in the places in which they are kept, in the offices of the management and the employees, not just in the meeting rooms of the Via San Carlo.

In more recent years, the decision was taken to let the most important pieces “migrate” around the branches of the banks affiliated to the Banca Popolare dell'Emilia: this decision has made it possible to put the Bank's picture collection on display in various Italian cities, culminating in the current exhibition on the Campidoglio, supported by the Municipality of Rome.

As the exhibition is on display at the Capitoline Museums, it seems natural to emphasis the many examples of paintings in the collection from the Emilia-Romagna school of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Care has been taken to privilege those painters who, due to the examples of their work also on display in the Capitoline art gallery, can become part of a dialogue, eliciting comparisons of both stylistic considerations and collecting technique.