I Guardi di Calouste Gulbenkian, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Sometimes works of art travel for decades before returning to the landscape that inspired them. This is the case with the paintings by Francesco Guardi brought together in the exhibition The Guardis of Calouste Gulbenkian, presented at Ca’ Rezzonico until June 8, 2026. The exhibition brings back to the lagoon city a selection of masterpieces now preserved at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, one of the most important collections devoted to the great Venetian vedutista of the eighteenth century. The works were acquired by the collector and philanthropist Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian between 1907 and 1921. Displayed in the Venetian museum alongside drawings from the civic collections, they offer a close view of the most personal and late phase of Guardi’s career. In these views eighteenth-century Venice appears vibrant and unstable, bathed in a light that seems to slowly erode its architecture. Guardi’s rapid and suggestive brushwork dissolves the precise geometry that had defined the Venetian veduta tradition, opening the way to a freer and more atmospheric form of painting. The city becomes almost an inner landscape shaped by the awareness that the aristocratic world it depicts is approaching its end. The return of these paintings to Venice is therefore more than an exhibition. It also tells a story about European collecting, bringing together the cultural memory of eighteenth-century Venice and the cosmopolitan taste of a twentieth-century collector who recognized in Guardi’s work one of the most poetic expressions of a changing world.

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