This event is a collaboration with the Gaudium Magnum Foundation and a great opportunity to find out more about private foundations and collections and their work in the UK and internationally. Speakers include Valentina Rossi, Managing Director and Head of Collections at Gaudium Magnum Foundation, Amparo Martinez-Russotto, curator of The Klesch Collection, Caterina Badan, curator at The Schroder Collection and Anita Sganzerla, curator of the Katrin Bellinger Collection.
Moderated by Marie Tavinor, who is the Programme Director of Royal Academy of Arts’s flagship Executive MA in Cultural Leadership programme and co-chair of The Society for the History of Collecting.
There will be an opportunity to network after the panel discussion.
Speakers:
Dr Caterina Badan is an art historian and Curator of the Schroder Collection. She holds an MA in Gallery Studies and a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex. She has published on the subject of early book illustration, as well as curated exhibitions dedicated to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts and early printed books at the Holburne Museum and Strawberry Hill House (2023–2024). She played a leading role in the conception, planning, and installation of a Kunstkammer-inspired gallery for the display of Renaissance works from the Schroder Collection at the Holburne Museum, Bath, as well as of a seventeenth-century picture gallery within the same institution. She edited and co-authored the accompanying catalogue, A Renaissance Treasury: The Schroder Collection at the Holburne Museum. She has also collaborated with Saatchi Gallery, contributing a historical framework to its recent exhibitions Flowers - Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture (2025) and The Sun and the Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial (2026) through the loan of objects from the collection.
Valentina Rossi is the Managing Director and Head of Collection of the Gaudium Magnum Foundation in Lisbon. An art historian, lecturer and curator, she holds an MA in History of Art and a Postgraduate Specialisation in Art History from the University of Florence. Before her current role, she worked across the art market and the non-profit cultural sector, most recently as Gallery Director at Galleria Carlo Orsi in Milan. At Gaudium Magnum, Rossi develops cross-disciplinary programmes linking art history, cultural heritage, research, public engagement, and digital access, with a focus on transforming a private collection into a public-facing cultural project. In the UK she is working on the research initiative Gothic Trajectories between Portugal and England, which explores the impact of the Monastery of Batalha on the development of the English Neo-Gothic and revolves around a very interesting chapter of the history of the Society of Antiquaries and has since been incorporated into the forthcoming Global Gothic conference (2027), organised by Strawberry Hill House & Gardens and Yale University. Rossi is leading the Foundation’s Open Collaborative Catalogue project, and is also developing a Cultural Leadership project titled Private Passion / Public Project, exploring how private cultural initiatives can evolve into structured, publicly engaged institutions.
Anita Viola Sganzerla has an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art. She is curator of the Katrin Bellinger Collection. Recent exhibitions she has worked on include Connecting Worlds: Artists & Travel (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, 2023) and Artists at Work (The Courtauld Gallery, 2018). A specialist in early modern Italian art, she has a particular research interest in the technical and conceptual complexity of works on paper, and the relationship between painting and the graphic arts. Amongst her current projects, Magic & Mess: The Artist’s Studio Revealed is scheduled to open at Leighton House in October 2026. She previously lectured at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Courtauld Institute and the University of Kent, and was a print room assistant at the Courtauld Gallery.