The Guttuso Museum was born in the rooms of Villa Cattolica, the suburban residence of Francesco Bonanno del Bosco, prince of Cattolica, who, in 1726, entrusted its transformation – from a baglio to a villa – to the architects Giuseppe Musso and Giuseppe Diamante. Twenty years later, it is assumed that the adaptation operation had come to an end.
Francesco Bonanno’s commission is also responsible for the completion of the second order of the central body of the building, completed by the first half of the 17th century. The order employed throughout the building is a variant of the Tuscan. The architectural conception of the villa, which reflected the social relevance of those who inhabited, was also an expression of the opulence of a ruling class, which designated the plain of Bagheria, an ideal place for their holiday residence.
At the end of the 19th century, the Villa Cattolica complex served as a shelter, during the cholera epidemic, and as barracks for Bourbon troops during the war, until Gioacchino Scaduto – a member of the bourgeois family of the same name from Bagheria – purchased it with the intention of transforming the rooms on the main and second floors into residences. To this period can be traced the execution of the frescoes of the vaults in the rooms present on the main floor, whose iconographic program includes Sicilian and Bagheria landscape views and allegorical figures.
During the first half of the 20th century, the lower bodies of the villa are employed in the performance of commercial activities. They serve as food storage, as spaces for woodworking, for the production of essences and, finally, as a steam plant for the production of canned food. These activities lasted until 1973, when the long process of transforming the building into a museum began.
The municipal administration of Bagheria, in fact, decided to rent the main floor of the villa and turn it into the headquarters of the civic “Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art”. The decision to change the destination of this space, through an act of such specific cultural significance, does not leave Bagheria painter Renato Guttuso indifferent, who decides, from the very beginning, that he wants to be involved in this important initiative through the donation of some works, which he executed, or which are part of his collection. Almost as if he wanted to consolidate the link with his homeland of origin, the artist’s gesture already seems to imply the premises of the future developments that the museum will face over the years. The relationship with Bagheria is one of the central aspects in the formation of the museum and the collections, to which further donations by coeval protagonists of the artistic scene will be afferent.
After a decade, when the director took office, it was deemed essential to carry out an examination of the works acquired up to that time and make a selection of them, so as to exhibit those with the greatest artistic relevance. The donation of the documentary material made by Guttuso in 1985, composed essentially of the works executed in the youthful years between 1924 and 1936, contributes to further expand the nucleus of works in the permanent collection, which dialogue with the works executed by the other artists, until recomposing the stylistic events that occurred in the history of Italian art between the first and second half of the twentieth century.
In the same years, the museum continued to enrich its holdings thanks to a conventional bequest from the Bagheria painter, including a relevant corpus of drawings.
The exhibition, held shortly after the painter’s death in the summer of 1987, Renato Guttuso from the beginnings to Gott mit uns is the first in a series of important exhibitions whose critical intent is to reconstruct the stages of his artistic journey and an occasion to fine-tune several restoration projects.
The painter’s passing does not compromise the relationship established with the museum, which continues the path of expanding its holdings, thanks to the donation by Fabio Carapezza Guttuso, of works of great artistic value, and priceless from the existential point of view of the artist. To celebrate the memory of the late artist, his sculptor friend Giacomo Manzù created a monumental ark, placed near the quadrilobed area in the villa’s northern exedra, where the deceased artist’s remains are kept.
The works in the permanent collection represent a composite core that testifies to the variety and complexity of Sicilian figurative culture in the 19th and 20th and early 21st centuries. Within the exhibition itinerary, the chronological datum is only the starting point of a narrative that transcends temporal boundaries. Each work entertains a relationship as much with works in the museum’s collection as with artistic phenomena of broader scope that occurred in the same years in Italy and abroad. The layout traces a line, which, although it does not always maintain a straight course, reconstructs the path, made up of precursors and sometimes returns, followed by artists born in Sicily, or landed there, for biographical and artistic reasons.
