The taste of collecting: great patrons and artists on Lake Como
Over three hundred years of great collecting connote the history of Villa Carlotta, where art dialogues with nature in a landscape of great charm. Overlooking the shores of Lake Como, in a pleasant place, it is still today the most visited villa of the Lario, according to a tradition dating back to its ancient owners who already since the eighteenth century, had welcomed distinguished guests and travelers in search of beauty.
Like in a large fresco, we see the characters of this long and happy story
marked by three important families: Clerici, Sommariva and finally Sassonia Meiningen. After them, the compendium passes to the Italian State and, since 1927, to the current management of the Ente Villa Carlotta.
The story begins with the Marquis Giorgio Clerici (1648–1736), a refined and influential man whose family had started his fortune right on the shores of Lake Como, in Domaso. A small center placed in a strategic position that had favored the trade of silk merchants (among them, Clerici family), with northern Europe and Flanders, through the Valtellina. But as early as in the beginning of the seventeenth century, the family had moved in Milan, after a brief stay in Como, starting a real social climb that reached its climax with Giorgio, son of Carlo Clerici (1615–1677).
In addition to a brilliant career in the legal field, with the obtaining of prestigious positions in the Spanish Milan, Giorgio had cultivated a great passion for the arts becoming a well-known collector and patron, coming in possess of over 1200 paintings, recorded in the inventory drawn up in 1736 at his decease and disseminated in his various sumptuous residences. Only in the villa of Tremezzo, whose construction dates back to 1690, there were more than 160 works arranged in the halls and in the Oratory, among which stood out the names of Legnanino, Filippo Abbiati, Cesare Procaccini, Margherita Caffi and numerous floral still lifes. Perhaps, the favourite genre for his wife Caterina Pallavicino Trivulzio, who got married to the Marquis in 1669.
This life, studded with continuous successes, doesn’t finish in the manner hoped by Giorgio, who sees his son Carlo Francesco prematurely disappear in 1722 and, even before, his beloved nephew Carlo Giorgio in 1717. Lonely and very rich, he puts his hopes in his only great-grandson Antonio Giorgio (1715–1768) who will inherit enormous fortunes, including the residence of Tremezzo together with the other villas of Castelletto di Cuggiono and Niguarda, which are known from a series of engravings assembled in an album by Marc’Antonio Dal Re in 1743.
Continuing the family tradition, Antonio Giorgio increases the art collections and in 1740 he addresses no less than a Giambattista Tiepolo for the decorative apparatus of the great gallery of the Milan palace, where he creates a sumptuous staging in imitation of other environments of great
representation of European nobiliary palaces and residences of the Baroque age.
A parable, that of the Clerici, which ended with Caterina (1736–1821), daughter of Antonio Giorgio and Fulvia Visconti, when the villa of Tremezzo was alienated in 1801 and acquired by Giovanni Battista Sommariva.
The furniture and almost all the goods, except some paintings and sacred objects kept in the Oratory, were dispersed. As a testimony to the splendor reached in the Clerici era survives, in the interiors of the villa on the second floor, only the precious decoration of the painted wooden ceilings and the decorative apparatus with false corbel and scrolls decorated with masks, festoons, and fruit and flower baskets. This precious unfolding of plant elements refers to the luxuriant citrus espaliers arranged on the terraces of the garden towards the lake, so thick as to be called true selve cedrine (citrus woods) by the same Marc’Antonio Dal Re.
At the time, the presence of a citrus grove was considered representative of the social position reached, and this precious collection including cedars, lemons, oranges and chinottos, continued to be the flagship of the subsequent owners too.
As we have already mentioned, the villa changed hands on November 24, 1801, being sold to the “emeritus citizen” Giovanni Battista Sommariva, then president of the Cisalpine Republic Government Committee. Sommariva, born in Santangelo Lodigiano in 1857, a skilful strategist, planned his social ascent covering important political positions alongside Napoleon Bonaparte, obtaining in exchange power and undisputed recognition.
The huge wealth accumulated thanks to the reached position allowed him a lavish existence and the opportunity to cultivate his immense passion for the arts, as a patron and a collector. His collections, initially set up in the French residences of Épinay and Paris, found their ideal location in the villa of Tremezzo, a house of fine art, as Sommariva loved to describe it in 1813, which was open to numerous travelers and guests who, with their stories and descriptions, magnified the fame of the collector and of the residence.
His collections included masterpieces by Antonio Canova, to whom Sommariva was bound by a deep friendship, so as to bring on the finger a precious ring with an engraved gem that reproduced the face of the sculptor, to seal the intimate passion for art that united them. This passion began frequenting the Roman studio of the sculptor, where Sommariva had commissioned Canova the imposing statue of Palamede, a Greek hero whose adventures narrated events in some aspects close to the client’s personal history.
Made between 1803 and 1804 the sculpture is depicted next to that of the muse Terpsichore in the famous painting by Pierre-Paul Prudhon of 1813, at present in the collections of the Pinacoteca di Brera, in which Sommariva had been portrayed together with the works he loved most of his collection. In Villa Carlotta the original plaster is preserved, which was used by the artist for the marble execution of the statue in 1811.
The Sommariva collection also includes other famous masterpieces such as the famous group of Lying Cupid and Psyche, a copy by Adamo Tadolini from the original Canovian model.
The fortune of this group in precious white Carrara marble was amplified by the close resemblance to the famous works of Antonio Canova, later joined into the collections of the Louvre and the Hermitage.
Next to the Canovian works, Sommariva manages to obtain for the villa of Tremezzo one of the absolute masterpieces of neoclassical sculpture: the great frieze with the Entrance of Alexander the Great into Babylon by Bertel Thorvaldsen.
The Danish sculptor is inspired by ancient history to immortalize in marble the glorious exploits of Alexander the Great that, in this case, allude to the success of Napoleon’s military campaigns in Egypt. In 1818, Sommariva signed a contract with Thorvaldsen and redeemed the prestigious commission, initially ordered by Napoleon for his installation in the Quirinale, in 1812. The large frieze, subdivided into tiles, was then transferred to Tremezzo to be installed in the ground floor hall, and the operation ended only in 1828.
Sommariva’s interest is not limited to sculpture, but also includes the glyptic and the great painting of history. In fact his collection includes, among the masterpieces still of neoclassical taste, The reading of the VI book of the Aeneid of Jean Baptiste Wicar (1820), where, as in the great frieze of Thorvaldsen, Sommariva is among the protagonists of the scene, in this case in the role of Mecenate.
On the other hand, the painting The last kiss of Romeo and Juliet by Francesco Hayez (1823) is completely different, which marks the turning point towards romantic culture in the taste orientation of the collector.
It should be reminded that Sommariva never separated from his collection. He had reproductions of the most famous works (on cameos, gems and enamels), that, as in a sort of portable museum, he could exhibit on any occasion to draw even more prestige and luster.
With the death of Sommariva in 1826, all of its immense heritage followed the path of dispersion and a common destiny seems to link the history of the Sommariva collection to that of Clerici. As a matter of fact, after the death of his son Luigi (1828), the last heir of Giovanni Battista, and despite the various attempts of the widow Emilia Seillière to keep the heritage undivided, the art collection was sold at auction.
The villa of Tremezzo was sold, together with a part of its art collections, to the princess Marianne of Nassau, consort of the Crown Prince Albert of Prussia.
Thus began new chapter for the history of the ancient eighteenth-century residence, when, in 1847, Marianne donated the villa to her daughter Carlotta (1831–1855), on the occasion of her marriage to Duke George of Saxonia Meiningen (1866–1914).
From this moment on, the house of the arts became for everyone Villa Carlotta and, as in a renewed fairy tale, returned to shine thanks to the passion that Princess Carlotta and Duke George reserved in keeping alive the great tradition for the arts that always had accompanied the different owners.
Maria Angela Previtera -Director
