(by Patrizia Vacalebri).
Culture Minister Dario Franceschini on Thursday announced a three-year partnership between Rome's Borghese Gallery and luxury fashion house Fendi, which will fund a new Caravaggio Research Institute, a digital platform and exhibits on the master of the 'chiaroscuro' technique in venues worldwide.
Franceschini hailed the partnership between the private donor and the public museum as being "thanks to a reform of the museum system that has brought us closer to European standards".
Under the three-year sponsorship, the Rome-based fashion house will be funding exhibits held at the Borghese Gallery and abroad.
The first show will be inaugurated on November 21 this year at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which will host for the first time three Caravaggio paintings that are part of the Gallery's collection: Saint Jerome Writing, Youth With a Fruit Basket and David With the Head of Goliath.
Fendi will initially allocate 1.3 million euros, its CEO and President Pietro Beccari announced Thursday, together with the director of the Borghese Gallery Anna Coliva.
The new institute will be dedicated to the work of Italian painter Caravaggio, including identifying his genuine paintings The center vies to become a key reference point in research on Caravaggio.
Its work will be published on an online platform to form a comprehensive database on the painter, who lived from 1571 to 1610.
Fendi is heavily involved in the art world.
It has sponsored, among others, an exhibition of works by Italian avant-garde artist Giuseppe Pennone at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, its newly renovated headquarters, and in Largo Goldini, as well as the renovation of the Italian capital's iconic Trevi Fountain.
The fashion house also footed the bill for the restoration of the Quattro Fontane (Four Fountains) complex in Rome's historic central district.
"So far all this has cost Fendi approximately 10 million euros", said Beccari.
The first exhibit to be funded by Fendi at the Borghese Gallery will be dedicated to Gian Lorenzo Bernini in continuation of celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the museum's reopening in 1997.
The show will open on October 31 and will run through February 4, 2018.
It will showcase masterpieces from the collections of, among others, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museus in London, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, the Staatliche Museum in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
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