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The archive Mucchi collects 328 letters and postcards sent to the painter Anton Maria Mucchi and his family from prominent personalities of the artistic-cultural environment on the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until the years of the Second World War, with the exception of a letter dated 1967 addressed to Mucchi's son and daughter-in-law by the priest and poet David Maria Turoldo.
Mucchi, born near Parma in 1871, died in Salò in 1945, was a pupil of Giacomo Grosso at the Accademia Albertina in Turin and then of Cesare Tallone at Carrara in Bergamo. In the Savoy capital he stayed until 1910, establishing home and studio in a villa to the Madonna del Pilone, frequented by the sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi, anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, poet Giovanni Cena and philosopher Annibale Pastore, teacher of Bobbio and Gramsci, and brother-in-law of the same Mucchi
Portrait painter and landscape painter, his brushwork in his youth shows the influence of Fontanesi and the Macchiaioli, then evolving in maturity into an impressionist trait.
After leaving Turin, which he considered too provincial, he moved to Rome and then to Milan in 1923. Here he remained eleven years, dealing mainly with restoration and antiques. He spent summers on Lake Garda, studying the local works of art, and moved there permanently (in Salò, where his wife owned a villa) in the early thirties. Here he conducted his research, critical studies on churches and in particular the cathedral of Salò, but also on eminent personalities of the place, including the painters Andrea Celeste and Cesare Ferro, and the luthier Gasparo Bertolotti known as Gasparo da Salò. In Salò he established the civic archaeological museum that today bears his name.
The Mucchi Fund consists of a collection of important personalities who have entered into relationships with the Mucchi family, Pellizza da Volpedo, Corrado Alvaro, Annibale Pastore, Enrico Thovez, Massimo Bontempelli, Giovanni Camerana, Pietro Canonica, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Lorenzo Delleani, Giuseppe Giacosa, Antonio Fogazzaro, Medardo Rosso. Very substantial are the letters of Sibilla Aleramo and the important correspondence of the sculptor and painter Leonardo Bistolfi (88 letters), whose cultural and artistic story has often crossed with that of his friend Anton Maria Mucchi.
- Archive inventory (pdf 182 KB)