Arte a San Leonardo was born from the desire of Anselmo Guerrieri Gonzaga and Ilaria Tronchetti Provera to create a dialogue between the languages of contemporary art and the history and identity of the San Leonardo Estate.
The project involves a different artist each year, who is asked to create an artist's label for a limited series of bottles of San Leonardo from the current vintage. Each edition of Arte a San Leonardo symbolically begins and ends at the beginning of spring, following the seasonal cycle of wine production, and unfolds in different moments: residency, research, design and production. As a continuation of the residency experience, the artist designs the labels, reinterpreting the classic San Leonardo label.
Arte a San Leonardo 2025 (2020 vintage)
Arte a San Leonardo presents "Memories of Reliable Things" by Linda Fregni Nagler. The artist was invited to develop a new project, to be presented in March 2025, to coincide with the launch of the 2020 vintage of San Leonardo.
Nagler created five original works that will become part of the San Leonardo collection, as well as an artist’s label specially designed to “dress” 999 bottles of San Leonardo from the 2020 vintage.
For this third edition, Linda Fregni Nagler focused her research on the San Leonardo museum, founded in 1975 by the Marquis Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga – a place that houses dozens of objects related to the history of the company and local rural society. The artist selected five objects from among those on display, and transformed them into images suspended in time, highlighting their uniqueness and their aesthetic and technical qualities.
According to Anselmo and Ilaria Guerrieri Gonzaga «Linda Fregni Nagler's work, through the language of contemporary art, reinterprets one of the most historically rich places in the estate, emphasising the central role of the tradition of human labor that for centuries has contributed to the creation of our wines. Her images pay homage to centuries of knowledge and expertise, to the objects and skills that, together, have helped to make San Leonardo such a unique place».
The San Leonardo 2020 Arte vintage will be released in the March 27, 12pm GMT, offered in the UK exclusively by Honest Grapes.
Arte a San Leonardo 2024 (2019 vintage)
The 2024 edition was with the participation of the artist Marzia Migliora and featured the new 2019 vintage (98 points from James Suckling).
Migliora developed the project "La Rivoluzione del Tempo Profondo" (The Deep Time Revolution), creating three labels with three different details of her drawing to adorn 999 bottles of San Leonardo vintage 2019. 80 limited edition three-bottle cases only were available in the UK, exclusively through Honest Grapes.
Arte a San Leonardo 2023 (2018 vintage)
In 2023, the inaugural Arte a San Leonardo cases were launched, featuring a limited edition of only 200 presentation cases in the UK, offered exclusively by Honest Grapes.
Each contained three individually numbered bottles of the latest vintage, 2018 (98 points from Monica Larner), with a unique artist’s label and brochure created by Simone Berti, at the end of a residency that developed over several periods during 2022:
“The theme of Berti's research is “L’attesa non è tempo sprecato” (Waiting is not time wasted), a reflection on the role of time and its various manifestations in the life of man and in that of nature, in the evolution of an artistic idea and in that of a product such as wine.”