Jan Wildens, Ice scaters – January 1615, Genoa, Palazzo Rosso
Trento, 5 December 2025 – 15 March 2026 | Opening: Thursday, 4 December at 5.00 pm
How did the artists of the past represent winter and its many facets? The exhibition aims to answer this question exploring the winter season, between reality and imagination, through a display itinerary that includes various types of artworks, such as paintings, sculptures, engravings and porcelain.
The Museum of Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento pays tribute to this great event with an exhibition dedicated to the representation of winter in figurative art, covering a time span extending from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The initiative is part of the cultural project Combinazioni caratteri sportivi, conceived and promoted by the Department of Culture of the Autonomous Province of Trento and is part of the Milan Cortina 2026 Cultural Olympics.
The exhibition features fifty works divided into eight sections.
In the first room, visitors, welcomed by the notes of Vivaldi’s Winter, are introduced to the themes of the exhibition with the reproduction of the month of January in Torre Aquila, one of the most famous representations of a snowy landscape in European art, where a “snowball fight” between ladies and knights appears for the first time in the history of Western art. The exhibition comes to life in the following room, which hosts the masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, from the Museo Correr in Venice.
The second and third sections are dedicated to the representations of winter allegories, immortalised by the artists as an old man, naked and cold, sometimes as a woman warming herself by the fire, or as a group of children playing in the snow. Among these works some engravings by Giulio Romano, Johann Sadeler and Antonio Tempesta, from the Musei Civici of Monza and from Sforza Castle in Milan, a terracotta by the Baroque sculptor Giovanni Bonazza, Meissen porcelain, a painting by Girolamo Donnini from the Credem Collection paintings by Vittorio Amedeo Rapous and Giuseppe Nogari stand out.
The fourth section is dedicated to the depiction of winter in the works of the Lombard painters Pietro Bellotti, Giacomo Ceruti and Antonio Cifrondi, with works from Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna and the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia.
The fifth section recounts the everyday life and typical activities during the cold season: from pig slaughtering, depicted in a magnificent painting by Jacopo Bassano’s circle from the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, to wood gathering; from frozen watercourses used as passageways to scenes of winter markets, well represented in a painting by Sinibaldo Scorza from the Strada Nuova Museums in Genoa.
The sixth section focuses on winter leisure activities: there are many scenes of ice skaters, but there are also curling players or those who enjoy throwing snowballs — all scenes well documented in the works of Jan Wildens and Barent Avercamp. In these paintings, the playful aspect is combined with the representation of the lower classes, for whom the coldest months of the year have always been a challenge for survival.
The seventh section is reserved for the sleigh seen as a work of art: three eighteenth-century parade sleighs are on display, accompanied by accessories such as warmers, a rattle and a late eighteenth-century treatise on sleighs.
The last section is dedicated to the snowy landscape, with artworks by Marco Ricci, Francesco Fidanza and Luigi Casali.
The exhibition, accompanied by a scientific catalogue published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, is curated by the museum’s curators Dario De Cristofaro, Mirco Longhi and Roberto Pancheri.
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