Introduction to this website

This website is a project dedicated to the memory of Renato Zanette (1951-1996), and gathers the artistic work he was involved in over almost thirty years of activity.

Research began in 2010 and has led to the identification of more than three hundred paintings, thanks to the help of relatives and friends both inside and outside the art world. Almost all of them are published here; the only ones left out are those for which no good-quality images exist.

It should be borne in mind that some paintings have not been possible to trace, since Renato gave away or sold his work throughout practically the whole of his artistic life.

Of some we have a record only through the material he left behind, such as photographs on old slides, or documents from his various solo exhibitions.
There are, however, works now lost that would probably deserve a place in this collection. The hope is of course to find them one day and add them to it.

Photographs of prints have also been included, together with a number of drawings, some preparatory and some not, as evidence of a very intense production.

Notes on cataloguing

Dating the paintings was not straightforward, and many of them are not even signed. The memory of the current owners did not always prove reliable once the true date of a work came to light. It should also be said that many paintings were given away or sold a considerable time after they were made, having remained in the artist’s studio for years. A chronological order has nonetheless been established by following the different phases of his painting, in the hope of keeping errors of date to a minimum; where a date is uncertain, it is given as an approximate year. Certain dates come mostly from the year Renato wrote beside his signature, a habit he kept until the early 1980s; this is why almost all the later paintings carry an approximate date.

The titles presented difficulties of their own. Those that are known come from exhibition documents, from the artist’s own lists or, in a few cases, directly from the back of the painting. Other documents record titles that are intriguing but hard to attach to any particular work, at least with the material available today. Where the naming is doubtful, the work has therefore been left untitled.