The Querini Stampalia family’s vast and varied heritage is the result of centuries of acquisitions and collecting. Since the founding of the Fondazione, donations and acquisitions continue to enhance it. Works of art, furnishings, books, letters, maps, coins, medals, fabrics, and millions of photographs: due to its nature and a lack of space, not all this immense wealth of material from the past and the present can be exhibited and readily accessible.
The Querini Stampalia fosters research, and studies and catalogues the collections, organised by provenance. The collections are made available to all, including in digital form when possible: a wealth of data, a precious documentary source about the life of the family, about Venice itself and about the world.
The library’s primary nucleus is that belonging to the Querini family. Enhanced over the centuries, today it is a collection of great significance. It contains approximately 1,300 manuscripts, 42,000 antique printed books, including 100 works from the fifteenth century, some of them rare or unique, 3000 prints, atlases, more than 350 geographical maps and cadastral maps. The family’s private archive holds documents, drawings and letters, and is a source of great interest because it sheds light, also from a private perspective, of how politics and business was carried out by the Venetian patrician class from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. To consult the archival collection, write to: biblioteca@querinistampalia.org
The collection contains: sculptures and paintings, including works by Luca Giordano e Federico Cervelli, drawings from the school of Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, Ludovico Carracci, and Marco Ricci; Flemish wall hangings (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries); tapestries, drapes, trimmings, ropes, curtain tiebacks (eighteenth century); a coin collection with Greek, Roman and Venetian coins, as well as modern Italian and foreign coins and medals, including the dogaressa Elisabetta Querini Valier osella, or coin. Some members of the Querini family were Superintendents of the Artilleries and the Arsenal. To them we owe the collection of artillery models (seventeenth and eighteenth century). To consult the collection, write to: museo@querinistampalia.org
Since the death of Count Giovanni Querini, the collections have been further enriched thanks to donations and acquisitions, becoming increasingly rich and interesting. To consult the collections, write to: museo@querinistampalia.org
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The artists involved in the decades-long Conserving the Future project often decide to donate a work to the Fondazione, as a souvenir of their participation and as testimony to the way they dialogued with the spaces, collections and architecture. Recent donations include works by George Adéagbo, Margherita Andreu, Stefano Arienti, Giuseppe Caccavale, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Mona Hatoum, Haris Epaminonda, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Joseph Kosuth, Maria Morganti, Giulio Paolini, Remo Salvadori, Mariateresa Sartori, Anita Sieff, Kiki Smith, and Qiu Zhijie.
The Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia collection, now known as the Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo, contains three nuclei. As well as the collection of artworks displayed to the public, the collection also contains the ‘Venetian Library’, which consists of bibliographical material concerning the history, economics and art of the city of Venice. The works were collected to document the great Venetian publishing tradition, with rare editions printed in Venice between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The third nucleus is the coin collection, which includes an important collection of coins from the Venetian mint: it documents the history of the Serenissima Republic from the second half of the thirteenth century until 1866. To consult the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, write to: biblioteca@querinistampalia.org
The Fondazione is also a place of photography: a centre of photographic documentation about Venice in particular and the study of the history of photography. Its photographic collections are a history of the world and of perhaps the most depicted city in the world. Approximately 2,800,000 ‘digital objects’ entered the collections between 2017 and 2021 thanks to three important donations: the Graziano Arici archive, the Luigi Ferrigno archive and the Mark Smith archive. Added to these are the Fondo Luigi Ghirri [Luigi Ghirri Archival Collection] and the Querini Archival Collection. To consult the photographic archives, write to: biblioteca@querinistampalia.org A platform is being developed which will soon allow visitors to consult all the photos digitally.
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Venerdì 26 gennaio 2024 la Biblioteca resterà chiusa.
