Jundt Galleries

A Grand Tour: Images of Italy from the Permanent Collection of the Jundt Art Museum

Through Sept. 1, 2020

In his book Italian Hours, author Henry James often commented on the tourist sites of urban Italy. In 1882, he noted, “The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger and remain and return.” James and other late-nineteenth–century Americans were continuing the British tradition of the Grand Tour in Italy, centered on its most important cultural cities and historic sites. This exhibition functions as a visual travelogue of the Italian peninsula using works of art from the collection of the Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University.

Both the exhibition and an accompanying book begin with sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century European prints, byproducts of artists’ visits mostly to the urban centers of Rome and Florence, and conclude with twenty-first-century images. Significant portions of the objects in this exhibition result from the Bolker Collection and from the Fredrick and Genevieve Schlatter Endowed Print Fund. A Grand Tour utilizes the Jundt Art Museum’s collection to present artistic imagery of the canals of Venice, the Renaissance architecture of Florence, and the classical remains of Rome, but also sites in Milan, Pisa, Assisi, Naples, and Palermo as well as other cities and towns. We hope that this selection of 76 images of Italy will give pleasure as one introduction to a wide-ranging and astonishing topic and as an opportunity, as James writes, “to linger and remain and return.”