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International illustration · Art in Vicenza
From The New Yorker to Palladio
Magazine cover artists and contemporary illustration in Renaissance and Baroque palaces
Readers of The New Yorker, The New York Times and National Geographic have good reason to look beyond the architecture when visiting Vicenza’s palaces. Through Illustri, the city’s illustration festival, artists including Malika Favre, Christoph Niemann and Javier Jaén have had solo exhibitions at Palazzo Leoni Montanari, the Baroque palace housing Gallerie d’Italia. Niemann’s first retrospective in Italy alone presented more than 200 works. With further exhibitions in the Basilica Palladiana and Palazzo Thiene, an art visit to Vicenza can include the people whose drawings accompany your reading, as well as the architects in your guidebook.
© Comune di Vicenza - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Know before you go
The exhibitions described belong to different editions of Illustri. Check the organiser’s current Vicenza programme before planning your visit, including the dates, venue and admission arrangements for each exhibition. Evening openings, talks and workshops follow their own schedules. Festival enquiries info@illustrifestival.com Gallerie d’Italia exhibition enquiries vicenza@gallerieditalia.com Gallerie d’Italia visitor information 800 167 619 · Italian toll-free number
About
You may know the images before you know the names. Javier Jaén, Malika Favre, Christoph Niemann, Noma Bar and Pablo Lobato have all come to Vicenza through Illustri, alongside leading Italian illustrators including Emiliano Ponzi, Olimpia Zagnoli, Felicita Sala and Beppe Giacobbe. Their usual territory is The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, publishing, advertising and international art direction. In Vicenza, the work appears somewhere rather different: inside the Basilica Palladiana, the baroque rooms of Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Thiene and other historic buildings across the centre. Javier Jaén’s 2024 exhibition alone brought to Palazzo Leoni Montanari work made for clients including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, National Geographic and UNESCO.
ONE FESTIVAL, A WHOLE CITY
Illustri is biennial, and its Vicenza editions are deliberately dispersed. The Basilica Palladiana hosts the major collective exhibitions. Gallerie d’Italia has presented the international Illustrissimo solo shows. Other editions have moved into Palazzo Cordellina, Palazzo Thiene and smaller spaces around the historic centre. In 2024, the programme extended across months with exhibitions, talks, workshops, portfolio reviews, live painting and evening events. The useful part is that you rarely spend the day inside one exhibition hall. You cross Vicenza between them.
From illustration to information design
In 2026, Gallerie d’Italia and Associazione Illustri presented Giorgia Lupi’s first solo exhibition, devoted to her work in information design. Lupi, a partner at the New York design firm Pentagram, uses drawing and data to describe subjects ranging from everyday habits to illness and social inequality. The Vicenza exhibition included Dear Data, her collaboration with Stefanie Posavec represented in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and 1,374 Days, her visual account of living with long Covid for The New York Times.
FORMAT
Biennial festival, with exhibitions and events across Vicenza.
MAIN LOCATIONS: Basilica Palladiana Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Leoni Montanari Historic palaces and independent spaces across the centre
ILLUSTRIOFF: The parallel programme extends into galleries, studios, shops and smaller cultural spaces.