Inside Villa Panza, an 18th-Century Italian Villa Housing a Contemporary American Art Collection

Have you ever wandered around a grand 18th-century estate recalling the images from the film Dangerous Liaisons while suddenly encountering exuberant pieces of the 20th and 21st-century art scattered around? Although this almost surely sounds like a fantasy – it is not. This particular scenography exists in Italy and is part of the Villa Panza estate.

The grand building stationed at the centre of the 33,000 square meters site has a U layout with a three-arched portico surrounding the courtyard. The interior includes a neoclassical hall located in the southwest part of the building and the eighteenth-century hall used as a chapel. In contrast, the exterior comprises an impressive park, a greenhouse, and a hill with a temple. But what about the collection?

The works acquired by Giuseppe Panza span across the estate and reflect the collector’s unique taste and ability to confront the historical context with an array of sensibilities and approaches of the renowned Pop and Land artists.

The Historical Backdrop of Villa Panza

Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, or Villa Orrigoni Menafoglio Litta Panza, is located in Biumo Superiore, a district of the city of Varese. The building was erected in the second half of the eighteenth century when the Marquis Paolo Antonio Menafoglio purchased some land on the hill of Biumo Superiore. In 1755 the works started, and by 1766 the estate was fully finished. The house was essentially imagined as a place of delight; it would not be the owner’s residence, but rather a place for social events.

Due to economic decline, the Menafoglio family had to sell the villa to Benigno Rossi in 1788. Three decades later, in 1823, the villa came into possession of the Milanese patrician Pompeo Litta Visconti Arese, who commissioned the architect Luigi Canonica in 1829 to redecorate the building and adapt it into a stately home.

In 1859, Villa Menafoglio served as a temporary hospital during the so-called Battle of Varese. The villa was inherited by Duke Litta’s eldest son Antonio Litta Visconti Arese, who died in 1866, and his wife, Isolina Prior, took over the entire property in 1876. Then, after her death in 1901, the estate was handed over to Litta’s nephew Henry David Prior, and finally, in 1935, it was bought by the Italian wine merchant Ernesto Panza, later Count of Biumo.

A tour of Villa Panza

Assembling The Art Collection

Giuseppe Panza, Ernesto’s son, earned a law degree at the University of Milan in 1948, but he got himself immersed in the family business of wine distribution and property. In 1956, together with his wife Rosa Giovanna, Panza started assembling the art collection after acquiring a work by Antoni Tàpies.

The Panzas were very much interested in European and American abstract painting and sculpture of the mid-1940s through the early 1960s; they purchased works by postwar European artists such as Jean Fautrier and American Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline and Mark Rothko. They were among the first patrons to collect Pop art, purchasing 11 of Robert Rauschenberg‘s “combines” of the mid-1950s, as well as works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist.

Following the changes in modern art, by 1966 the Panzas focused on Minimalist and Conceptual Art, and became early collectors of the works by Bruce Nauman, Brice Marden, Hanne Darboven, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Lawrence Weiner, and others.

The collection Panza formed between 1966 and 1976, and again from the late 1980s, gained the reputation as one of the most important single collections of American art of the 1960s and 1970s. Panza’s personal collecting pursuit was led by almost philosophical aspirations, as he explained in several texts and interviews. He was transfixed by the reduced shapes of Minimalist sculpture that appealed to him as a search for the eternal and absolute. He was prone to acquiring groups of works by certain artists, sometimes buying out the entire contents of gallery exhibitions.

Around 1970, the villa’s stables were renovated into galleries for larger sculptures, and in the mid-1970s, Panza commissioned artists to produce site-specific installations there. As he ran out of space at the villa, Panza became obsessed with finding a permanent home for this part of his collection. He was hoping to establish the first European Environmental Art Museum; however, such a plan remained unrealised.

Interestingly, in 1989, Donald Judd wrote an article titled Una stanza per Panza and accused Panza of producing his works from the sketches he owned without the artist’s permission and installing them at the estate. Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman also had issues with some of the pieces Panza made from sketches.

Villa Panza – A Place To Visit

In the 1980s, Giuseppe Panza started disposing of some artworks in his collection. He had no success in selling the artworks in Italy, so the art collector turned to international museums; he arranged gift and loan deals that eventually upgraded the collections of several American museums.

In 1982, Werner Schmalenbach, the former director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen tried to acquire the collection, but the plans failed due to cuts in the museum’s budget. In 1984, Panza sold a great deal of Abstract Expressionist and Pop artworks to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which formed the core of the museum’s permanent collection. Ten years later, the collector donated 70 pieces by ten young local artists to MOCA. The Guggenheim acquired more than 300 Minimalist sculptures and paintings in 1991 and 1992; The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden made an acquisition of thirty-nine works from the Panza collection in 2008, including numerous pieces by Robert Irwin, Joseph Kosuth, Hamish Fulton, On Kawara, and others, and the same year, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired 71 artworks by 15 artists, partly as a gift from the Panza family. The SFMoMa acquired 25 of the remaining major works of Conceptual and Minimalist art from Panza’s collection in 2010.

The rest of the artworks remained in the 18th-century Villa Panza, including those made by James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, Ruth Ann Fredenthal, Allan Graham, Ford Beckman, and David Simpson. In 1996, Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo bequeathed Villa Panza to The Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI) or the National Trust of Italy. This museum kind of an institution periodically organizes temporary exhibitions inside the villa that now operates as a public site.