Vatican Museums

From 14 November, the Vatican Museums will welcome the public with the exhibition “Irrepressible Curiosity. Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century from the Leone Piccioni Collection” curated by Micol Forti, Director of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collection. The exhibition brings together masterpieces from the extraordinary collection of the Catholic intellectual Leone Piccioni (Turin 1925 – Rome 2018), donated by his children Gloria and Giovanni to the Pope’s Museums in 2024. The exhibition is both a homage to the centenary of his birth and a tribute to the generosity with which his children chose to share their father’s precious legacy with the community.

A writer, literary and art critic, academic, journalist, film director and deputy Director General of the RAI, Leone Piccioni loved to define his collection – made up of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints by twentieth-century Masters – as “my pride and joy, my patrimony”. Contemporary art always occupied a central place in his life, nurtured by encounters, friendships and intellectual exchanges that fuelled his critical reflection and, over the years, gave shape to a body of works of extraordinary quality, preserved in his house in Rome together with an extensive library. A key figure in his career was Giuseppe Ungaretti, his teacher and close friend, with whom Piccioni graduated in Rome in 1948. Thanks to the poet, he came into direct contact with some of the representative voices of the twentieth century: Burri, Morandi, Guttuso, Carrà, Fautrier, Dorazio, all present in the exhibition with emblematic works reflecting the collector’s refined personal taste.

Each exhibition room recounts an aspect of the genesis of this collection: the importance of human encounters, the vitality of exchanges in the cultural circles frequented by Piccioni, and the aesthetic sensibility that guided his unpredictable choices.