A new permanent collection at the Museo del Gioiello

The Museum is inaugurating its third biennial on 14th December inside Vicenza’s Basilica Palladiana

With an entirely new selection, the third biennial at Vicenza’s Museo del Gioiello, the jewellery museum promoted by Italian Exhibition Group Spa in partnership with Vicenza Municipality, will see a substantial renewal of its collection.

310 unique and exclusive exhibits, priceless masterpieces, many of which belong to private collections that are not usually accessible to the public or to sector insiders. An original and unprecedented account of the history of jewellery through a “mixture of contemporaneity, suggestions from the past and projections into the future” and 9 internationally famous curators to interpret the extraordinary exhibition area located inside the magnificent Basilica Palladiana.

The Museo del Gioiello, directed by Alba Cappellieri, Professor of Jewellery Design at Milan Polytechnic and Italy’s leading jewellery expert, will be inaugurating its third “edition” on 14th December next which will be accessible to the public until the end of 2020.

On entering the exhibition, the visitor will be greeted by the ‘Flora High Jewellery’ necklace by Bulgari, the item selected by professor Cappellieri as the emblem of the third edition.

9 rooms for nine meanings of jewellery among eras, geographies and origins: jewellery defined as Symbol, Magic, Function, Beauty, Art, Fashion, Design, Icon and Future, each, in the new edition, entrusted to an internationally famous curator who has interpreted the meaning through extraordinarily beautiful and priceless items of jewellery.
Pascale Lepeu – Director of the Cartier collection for over 30 years – selected the items for the SYMBOL ROOM which hosts extraordinary jewellery able to illustrate the symbolic power of ornaments, while

Cristina Boschetti - archaeologist and researcher at CNRS Orléans, institute IRAMAT - has been entrusted with the MAGIC ROOM amid protective amulets and talismans, jewellery with propitiatory powers to ward off evil influences.

For the FUNCTION ROOM, Massimo Vidale – professor of Archaeology at Padua University – decided to focus on the communicative function of jewellery by displaying seals, the jewellery of warriors from different cultures as well as rings and pendants used by rappers, elements that help to build and transmit the identity of the person wearing them.

The BEAUTY ROOM contains an interpretation by Patrizia di Carrobio – a diamond expert in New York. In her opinion, jewellery transfers beauty to those who admire it. The theme is play with a fascinating blend of values where high and fashion jewellery intermingle.

Marie-José van den Hout - the famous Dutch gallery manager, founder of the Marzee, the world’s largest independent gallery - is in charge of the ART ROOM. The theme is gold and the story unravels through the experimentation processes of international artists who were not afraid to take creativity and experimentation to the limit, achieving surprising results.

In the FASHION ROOM, under the curatorship of Chichi Meroni, the creative soul of Arabesque, the cult store in the centre of Milan and a popular wunderkammer of costume jewellery, fashion and mid-century design, the visitor is accompanied on a journey during which, allowing himself or herself to be transported by the costume jewellery created for fashion between the 1920s and ‘80s, will dock at nine islands in the history of “bijoux de couture” and its bond with the seven greater arts which, in this Room, will finally include fashion and design.

Alba Cappellieri herself is the curator of the DESIGN ROOM dedicated to “designers without design”, in other words, to those designers that have never explored any other product than jewellery. It is a reflection that takes jewellery designers, who are also artisans and authors, back into the design hive that has ignored them for too long and shows us the permeability and transverse nature of jewellery design.

The ICON ROOM is under the curatorship of Gabriele and Emanuele Pennisi, top jewellers and antique dealers from Milan, who specialize in antique jewellery. This selection dedicated to Europe contains masterpieces from the past dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries, icons of their times: from the extraordinary mountings of the 1800s to the exquisite workmanship of jewels in enamel and from seals to portraits of famous people.

The last room, devoted to the FUTURE, is the responsibility of international fashion designer, Olga Noronha. Her opinions of jewellery in the future include various and multi-disciplinary perspectives.

The Museo del Gioiello offers a vision of a useable and multi-functional “museum area” that integrates a variety of projects and becomes a “mutating Museum” able to attract visitors with different interests and sensitivities, something that very few international Design Museums are able to do.