The Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, one of the oldest in Italy, is a place of study, production and preservation of art, dedicated to the training of artists, designers and professionals in this field.
Placed in 1804 in the present site, the once cloister of Sant'Ignazio, the Academy was originally founded in 1710 as the Clementine Academy, from which it inherited and subsequently implemented the historical core of the sculptural heritage of chalk, paintings, drawings, prints and documents that it still preserves today.
From the initial four classes of teaching, one for painters, one for sculptors, one for architects and one for art scholars, the Academy has in recent years expanded its training offering with disciplines close to contemporary, respecting always their tradition and maintaining the specificity of technical and theoretical knowledge.
There have been so many great masters who have contributed to making it an Institution of Higher Education today: from Carlo Cignani, first Prince of the Academy, to Donato Creti, from Antonio Basoli to Giacomo de Maria, from Giorgio Morandi to Virgilio Guidi, up to Quinto Ghermandi and Concetto Pozzati to name just a few. The rich plastic, archival, pictorial and graphic heritage kept in school spaces is still subject to study, reorder, cataloguing and research by academics and students of the Academy itself and becomes public and shared in the galleries and digital exhibits presented here.