The Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa is presenting the public with a selection of works from the Remondini collection, one of the richest graphic holdings in Veneto, from 18 April 2025 to 27 October 2025, exploring creatures and legends of the fantasy world through the eyes of some of the most renowned and influential Italian and European masters of the engraving art.

Starting from the sixteenth century, and particularly in the northern world, which opposed the restrained Mediterranean classicism, an interest in the magical, the dreamlike and the fantastical spread throughout Europe thanks to printing, inspiring artists to explore the bizarre and the irregular, and giving rise to mysterious and fanciful creatures that inhabit the world of the imagination and popular beliefs. 

The “Dream and Magic. The Universe of Fantasy in the Engravings of the Remondini Collection” exhibition, curated by Riccardo Toffanin and presented on the main floor of the Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa, will allow visitors to immerse themselves in a world inhabited by witches, elves, alchemists and sea creatures: emblematic figures of popular traditions that inhabit the border between the sacred and the profane, the supernatural and the everyday, magic and reason. 

The exhibition covers three centuries of superb engraving art through the work of some of its greatest masters, such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Agostino Veneziano, Giorgio Ghisi, Jacques Callot and Giambattista Tiepolo, encouraging the public to discover a world in which the confine between the visible and the invisible fades. It is an art that not only reproduces reality but transforms it, distorting it and amplifying it through the lens of the imagination, to describe what monsters are generated by the sleep of reason.

The exhibition is thus presented not only as a chance to rediscover some masterpieces from the Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa collections, usually not on public display, but especially to immerse oneself in the obscure beauty of an art that was able to look beyond the visible, exploring the roots of anxieties and fascinations that still dwell in our imagination.


In cover: Albrecht Dürer, “The Knight, Death and the Devil”, 1513. Bulino. Museo Civico of Bassano del Grappa.
© MBA Musei Biblioteca Archivio of Bassano del Grappa

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