The Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrade and the Museum of the City of Novi Sad present the exhibition Roma Aeterna. Capolavori della scultura romana dalla Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli (Masterpieces of Roman sculpture from the Dino and Ernesta Santarelli Foundation), which gathers a valuable selection of thirty-three works arranged in chronological order from the 1st century BC to the 18th century. The sculptures, mainly made of marble, alabaster and porphyry and representing the artistic and stylistic evolutions in Rome, are divided into royal portraits, of historical figures or animals, and ideal portraits, of pagan gods, satyrs, or sacred gods. The exhibition opens and is presented to the media on Tuesday, June 30th, at 12.00 am at the Foreign Art Collection of the Museum of the City of Novi Sad and can be visited until 11th September 2020.
The Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli Foundation, established in 2004 by the will of Paola Santarelli and her mother Ernesta Santarelli D’Orazio in memory of her father Dino Santarelli, is a non-profit organisation of social utility born with the aim of encouraging, supporting and promoting research and dissemination of art history and the history of Rome in Italy and abroad, with particular reference to stone sculpture, coloured marble and glyptic. The collection of the Santarelli family renews a millenary Roman tradition that has been widespread in the city since the Renaissance and which in turn dates back to a custom of the Roman aristocracy of the imperial age, linked above all to the need for decorum and social ostentation that provided for the display of statues in their residences, mostly copies of Greek originals.
The Roma Aeterna exhibition, which allows us to go through nineteen centuries of Roman collecting history, is scientifically curated by Daniela Ricci and organised by Glocal Project Consulting in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute of Belgrade and the Museum of the City of Novi Sad, under the auspices of the Italian Embassy in Belgrade and the City of Novi Sad.
