The Cerruti Collection. The Entrance and the Rectangular Room

The small, elongated space was the villa’s original entrance, the point of access for the collector’s guests on Sundays and occasions like the feast of St Frederick of Utrecht (his name day) and New Year’s Eve (1 January was his birthday), when the private villa consecrated to the pleasures of the mind opened up briefly to the social whirl. Though small in size, the hall displays Cerruti’s eclecticism in all its fullness and complexity. While the 18th-century-style decoration (continuing on the walls of the adjoining stairway) is typical of the taste of the wealthy local upper class - ably promoted by the Turinese antique dealer Pietro Accorsi - elements like the mirrored niche housing Valerio Castello’s Mosè fa scaturire l’acqua dalla roccia (Moses Striking Water from the Rock, c. 1655) create a contrast of eras and tastes. This can also be discerned in the juxtaposition of furniture and paintings, from the mid-18th-century Genoese console table supporting a Louis XV pendulum clock and the exquisite Rococo sofa with polychrome marquetry (whose twin is in the circular room on the same floor) up to Simone Cantarini’s large Lot e le sue figlie (Lot and his Daughters, c. 1637), Alfred Sisley’s glowing winter landscape (1881) and Cézanne’s La Fontaine (The Spring, c. 1876-78), the first work to greet Cerruti’s guests. This very small and precious rural scene was originally placed on the top of an elegant Louis XV table together with the guestbook which was signed by all of the visitors to the villa.
The refurbishment of some parts of the villa carried out in the mid-1980s reflects the tastes of Pietro Accorsi, the well-known Turin antique dealer. An example is provided by the rectangular sitting room, which combines with the adjoining circular drawing room to reiterate one of the settings created first by Accorsi and then by Ometto in the house and museum on Via Po in Turin, now the Fondazione Accorsi-Ometto. The fabrics, wallpaper, woodwork and arched dividing element in this Louis XVI sitting room appear to be repeated in the villa. The uniformity of taste that characterises the Accorsi setting, however, gives way to the variety of styles and to the extraordinary quality typical of the Cerruti Collection. On the rear wall, dominating the space, is a key work by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo entitled "Membra stanche" (Weary Limbs, 1907), which could be interpretated as an echo of the collector’s childhood early in the 20th century, when his own family emigrated from Liguria to Piedmont. Opposite hangs a superb "San Lorenzo" (St Lawrence) by Jusepe de Ribera, dated to the 1640s. Three Renaissance majolica plates are displayed on the upper section of a roll-top secretary desk by Jean-François Leleu (1770s), which shares the wall space with a late 14th-century triptych by Agnolo Gaddi, a pair of architectural capriccios by Francesco Guardi (1770s) and two views of Venice by his son Giacomo (1790s). Louis XV and XVI ceramics and candlesticks, wooden and marble sculptures ranging from the 14th to 16th centuries, French and Italian furniture of the 18th century, a painting in oil on copper by Domenichino (c. 1605), a canvas by Simon Vouet (c. 1635), and an oil painting on cardboard by Gino Severini (1918) all demonstrate the extent to which Cerruti collected across categories and time periods, disrupting the traditional chronology of art history.