The Collectors: Gianni and Marella Agnelli
Author:
Tobias Czudej
Author: Tobias Czudej
10 September 2026
Ardent art collectors, Agnelli and his wife decided to create homes designed specifically for their collection. “I decorated the houses, but everything that is objects, paintings, that’s Gianni. He really chooses all the pictures, all the objects,” Marella told Vogue in 1977. “Once you get the bug for modern art, it becomes more and more challenging, more and more amusing.” [2] Their apartment in Rome, located at Via XXIV Maggio, spanned the entire top floor of a 19th-century palace. Designed by Ward Bennett, the main living room featured Robert Indiana’s number paintings, and a steel and wire sculpture by Oskar Schlemmer was installed above antiquities. The space showed that the Agnellis were willing to blur different schools and styles into a unique space that led Hubert de Givenchy to declare, “This is the only contemporary house I have seen that has true grandeur.”
On a hill overlooking Turin was Villa Frescot. Designed by Renzo Mongiardino, its rooms were filled with Louis XVI tables and humble wicker chairs with Francis Bacons propped against the basement walls. Agnelli called Bacon “the greatest twentieth-century painter, once Picasso and de Chirico died.” At one point, he kept the disquieting works in his bedroom. When his wife asked him how he could sleep, she recalled, “he just laughed. He rather likes the extremes in that way.” Agnelli himself once explained, “Even if after some time the presence of a painting bothers me, and if it is a troubling work, such as a Schiele or a Bacon, I keep it very close for one year, six months. When I like a painting, I keep it very close to me.” When asked why the Bacons were in the basement, Agnelli told a reporter, “I like my pictures, but I move them around from one house to another.” [3]
During the couple’s frequent travels, they made sure to stop by the latest exhibitions. On trips to New York, in between posing for Warhol and befriending dealer Leo Castello, they “spent hours scouring downtown galleries and visiting artists’ studios,” per Marella. “We soon realized we had no idea where to put the huge works by these young painters we were discovering: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselmann, Frank Stella, Robert Indiana.” [4]
Agnelli commissioned Italian architect Gae Aulenti to design an apartment in Milan specifically for the couple’s collection. Completed in 1969, “House for an art collector” was characterized by stainless steel and chrome, which showed off a flock of François-Xavier Lalanne’s lifesize sheep and a bronze by Magritte in the bathroom. Agnelli also enlisted Aulenti, alongside Venetian architect Antonio Foscari, to remodel the Palazzo Grassi after the FIAT group took over in 1983. Under Agnelli’s guidance until 2005, the space was internationally recognized for its art exhibitions.
In the early 1980s, the couple upgraded to a larger Upper East Side apartment at 770 Park Avenue and enlisted the Italian decorator Renzo Mongiardino and the then-rising-architect Peter Marino. Mongiardino chose colors that would complement the art, Pompeian red for Picasso and vertical stripes of black, blue, and white for Matisse. [5]
Since 2002, pieces from the couple’s collection have been displayed at the Pinacoteca Agnelli, a small Renzo Piano-designed gallery atop the Lingotto Building, a former Fiat factory in Turin. The Agnellis donated more than 20 paintings, including works by Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Canaletto, and Modigliani. “Every single one is a masterpiece,” Pierre Rosenberg, former chief curator of the Louvre, wrote in the introduction to the inaugural catalog. “Gianni Agnelli’s intentions were clear. The point was to offer pleasure, beauty, and joy to his fellow citizens.” [6]
2
Buck, Joan Juliet. “Marella’s Way.” Vogue. January 1977.
Image: Oskar Schlemmer, “Drahtfigur Homo mit Rückenfigur auf der Hand” (1930/1931); Robert Indiana’s number paintings; Seated sculpture by Marino Marini; Jasper Johns, “Two Maps” (1965)
Author: Tobias Czudej
10 September 2026
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