Carrara Academy of Bergamo

The art gallery is one of the best in Italy in terms of quality and breadth of cultural-historical horizons, to be visited in a neoclassical building at the foot of Bergamo Alta that has been perfectly restored thanks to a series of extensive works completed in 2015. The founder of the Academy had been Count Giacomo Carrara in 1795, who had donated his already splendid personal art collection. Numerous other private donations had enlarged the collections since the early 19th century, and they were joined at the end of the 20th century by some 50 fine sculptures left by the great art historian and connoisseur Federico Zeri.

The Academy now houses more than 1,500 artworks by Italian and European painters from the 14th to the 19th century, in particular from the Bergamo, Lombard and Veneto schools, but with interesting Tuscan and Flemish influences. Among the artists on display are Antonio and Bartolomeo Vivarini, Bonifacio Bembo (the famous illuminated tarot cards), Pisanello, Vittore Carpaccio (Birth of Mary), Sandro Botticelli (a portrait of Giuliano de\' Medici), Andrea Mantegna (Madonna and Child), Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Lorenzo Lotto, the Baschenis of the Bergamasque valleys, Titian (Orpheus and Eurydice), Tintoretto (a portrait of Gerolamo Venier), El Greco, Giovan Battista Moroni, Fra\' Galgario, Francesco Guardi (a view of the Rio dei Mendicanti in Venice), Canaletto (the Grand Canal, also in Venice), Bernardo Bellotto, and the 19th-century Venetian-Milanese Francesco Hayez.

Paintings are complemented by drawings, prints, miniatures, bronzes and plaques, medals, ceramics and porcelain, cameos, glass and weapons.