Museo dei Bozzetti Pierluigi Gherardi

The Museo dei Bozzetti “Pierluigi Gherardi” was founded in 1984 in Pietrasanta on the initiative of Jette Muhlendorph, who, since 1973, has collected models and works by the artists working in the area. It is an institute with distinctive features centred, naturally, on the main art form of the Apuan Alps and Versilia territory, i.e. sculpture, which boasts more than 500 years of history, starting with the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. The museum collection contains, at present, more than 700 pieces among sketches and models, mostly produced in plaster, and offered by around 350 Italian and foreign artists. The sketches are on a small scale while the models are full-scale, and represent the embryonic nucleus of what will then become the completed work of art, its genesis and evolution.

The museum stands out also for its building of high artistic and historical value, the former Convento di Sant’Agostino in Pietrasanta. A separate branch was opened in 2000, at the former warehouses of Cooperativa di Consumo in Via Marconi, called Museo dei Bozzetti 2. It houses about 300 of the sketches contained in the museum collection, divided into “Sezione contemporanea”, “Galleria del Disegno degli Scultori”, “Sezione Donna Scultura” and “Sala del Primo Novecento”. Additionally, the building includes a reconstruction of craft workshops and the didactic Atelier.

It houses the preliminary sketches and the models used by the artists coming to Pietrasanta from all over the world to work on the marble of local quarries and to take advantage of the craft experience of sculpture workshops and art foundries