Accademia Carrara Visitor’s Guide

Accademia Carrara Visitor’s Guide

Project by

Thanks to

Associazione Amici dell’Accademia Carrara

With the contribution of

Accademia Carrara 5 A Collectors’ Museum

Visitor’s Guide The Renaissance in Northern Italy

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The Collectors

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The Renaissance in Central Italy and Flanders

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Venice and the Mainland in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century

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Schools. Northern Italy Between the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

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The High and Late Renaissance

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The Triumph of Painting.

The Age of Baroque and Rococo

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The Sculpture Collection

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The Nineteenth Century.

The Age of the Bourgeoisie

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Index of artists 116

Accademia Carrara A Collectors’ Museum Two Centuries of History The Accademia Carrara has more than two centuries of history behind it. This is a considerable amount of time for an institution that can boast of being one of the oldest picture galleries in Lombardy and a gallery that over the years has built a strong identity as a museum for collections and collectors.

Founded at the end of the eighteenth century thanks to the generosity of a private citizen, Giacomo Carrara (1714 - 1796), the Accademia has seen its wealth of holdings grow significantly thanks to a steady series of donations and bequests, bearing witness to an unbroken tradition of affection and patronage initiated

by Count Carrara’s generous gesture. This tradition was sealed in 1958, when the City of Bergamo became the owner of the institution, at which point it became a civic museum in all respects.

An art connoisseur and scholar, Giacomo Carrara acquired a very extensive collection of paintings, drawings and prints. He made these available to enthusiasts and founded a School of Painting.

In 1796, at the end of an entire lifetime dedicated to the study and promotion of the arts, he made the Gallery and School his successor, to be managed by the Commissioner, a body composed of members of the aristocracy of Bergamo. To equip the School with adequate space and give the Carrara collection an appropriate exhibition venue - a collection which in 1804 saw the addition of a sizeable group of paintings from the Venetian collection of Salvatore Orsetti - in 1810, the architect Simone Elia completed the construction of a new building in neoclassical style. Today it continues to be the site of the museum, while the school, between 1912 and 1914, was relocated to the garden in the back.

A reorganization of the gallery was necessary, as it was still organized as a seventeenth-century quadreria or picture gallery. Therefore in 1835, a part of the collections was auctioned off and this decision led to the depletion of the collection and particularly the Baroque and Rococo works. Over the course of more than two centuries, the Accademia Carrara’s patrimony has seen an extraordinary growth thanks to the many donations received by the museum. Some of the main donations include the legacy of Count Guglielmo Lochis (1789 - 1859), public administrator, politician and formidable collector. His prestigious collection was left to the City of Bergamo, which gave

up a part of the collection, but did however keep 240 important paintings. Shortly after, in 1891, the museum also received the collection of paintings

by Giovanni Morelli (1816 -1891), one of the founding fathers of modern art history. Alongside the major donations received over the years, a rich constellation of more than two hundred precious legacies have enhanced the Accademia Carrara’s holdings, which now amount to 1,800 paintings. Added to these are an extensive and important collection of drawings and prints and precious groups of decorative arts including bronzes, medals, fans and porcelain. The last bequest in order of time comes from Federico Zeri (1921 - 1998), one of the greatest art connoisseurs of the twentieth century, who left his collection of sculptures to the Carrara.

The New Organisation The Accademia Carrara reopens to the public in April of 2015. In the seven years of closure required for the necessary restoration and adaptation of the museum’s systems and facilities, the museum carried out an intensive study of its specific characteristics, with the resulting new organization of the permanent collection.

The new tour of the Accademia Carrara is arranged over two floors and comprises twenty-eight exhibit rooms of different sizes, thirteen on the first floor and fifteen on the second, for a total of over six hundred works on display, including paintings, which represent the majority, and sculptures. The itinerary winds along a span of five centuries, from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and touches upon the main Italian schools of painting, including Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria, but also painting from beyond the Alps, from Flanders and Holland in particular.

The purpose of the guide is to give visitors an orientation tool for the museum tour. It is divided into eight sections which group together clusters of consecutive and homogenous exhibit rooms. Each section is introduced by a short text, which provides a concise framework for the different topics covered

in the exhibit rooms, and is accompanied by brief informative texts for the major works. Of the more than six hundred pieces in the exhibition, the reader will find updated news on a selection of sixty paintings and sculptures that form the backbone of the museum and provide an idea of ​​the richness and variety of its collections.

This second edition, printed in March 2019, almost four years after the first, published in April 2015, has been revised and updated also on the basis of the results of the recent publication of the first volume of the museum’s scientific catalog: Accademia Carrara Bergamo. Dipinti del Trecento e del Quattrocento.

Catalogo completo, a cura di G. Valagussa, Milano 2018.

The hope is that the guide, as well as accompanying the visitor through the museum, will also help relive this experience later, motivating and stimulating further visits to the Accademia Carrara.

Visitor’s Guide

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The Renaissance in Northern Italy

Rooms

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The Advent of Reality

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Light and Colour in Venice

Northern Italy and its flourishing urban centres were the scene of a splendid period in the arts during the fifteenth century, marked by the slow decline of Late Gothic taste intertwined with the gradual establishment of the Renaissance. An emblematic figure in this transitional phase was Pisanello, who combined the elegance and chivalrous ideals typical of the world of the medieval courts with the first fervour of humanism.

The throbbing heart of the Renaissance renewal was Padua. The presence in the city of the Florentine sculptor Donatello between 1443 and 1453 prompted artists to engage more directly with the Tuscan innovations: the perspectival construction of space, the study of classical models and the possibility of faithfully representing human life and emotions.

Padua witnessed the growth and emergence of Andrea Mantegna, Northern Italy’s leading Renaissance figure.

His severe, solemn style, which drew heavily on ancient art, represented an almost incomparable benchmark for artists of his generation, often striving to combine aspects of the fable-like narration of the court world with a more confident spatial rendering of figures and architecture.

Instead, in Venice, the second half of the fifteenth century was marked by the emergence of Giovanni Bellini. His painting was based on the skilful use of light and colour, which gave his compositions a sweetness and verve that had never been seen before. But first and foremost, he was the first great interpreter of the human figure in a natural landscape setting.

Also working in the city, besides Bellini, were masters with different approaches, strongly influenced by the work of Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian artist who sojourned in Venice around 1475. Standing out from among the others was Vittore Carpaccio, who specialized in producing large narrative canvases for the lay confraternities known in the lagoon as scuole or “schools�.

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1

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The Advent of Reality

1441-1444 (?) tempera on panel 29 × 19.5 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Pisa, Verona or San Vito (?) c. 1395 Naples c. 1455

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Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) Portrait of Leonello d’Este Pisanello was the last exponent of the highly elegant court culture known by the name of International or Late Gothic. An itinerant artist working between Verona and Venice, Mantua and Milan, Rome and Naples, he was for a long time in the service of Leonello d’Este, the refined Marquis of Ferrara. The Carrara portrait was probably executed in a celebrated painting competition in 1441, which saw Pisanello pitted against Jacopo Bellini. The set of the profile takes up the model of ancient medals, but the distinctive features of the face are carefully investigated.

Leonello’s thick head of hair, the brocade of his attire and the herbarium flowers of the rose garden are meticulously described with the soft, molten brushstrokes typical of the artist’s refined and profane taste.

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The Advent of Reality

c. 1440 - 1445 tempera and gold on panel 58.4 × 32.7 cm 58.1 × 34 cm gift of Antonietta Noli Marenzi, 1901

documented from 1441 Padua before 1450

Giovanni d’Alemagna Saint Apollonia with her Teeth Torn Out Saint Apollonia Blinded Giovanni d’Alemagna was an artist of German origin who worked between Venice and Padua in the 1440s.

Together with his brother-in-law Antonio Vivarini, with whom he often collaborated, he was one of the most lively interpreters of the period of transition between the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the Veneto.

The Accademia Carrara panels are part of a larger whole whose original appearance is unknown, but which included two other small panels depicting scenes from the life of Saint Apollonia, held in the Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa and the National Gallery of Washington. The fable-like narrative tone, the profane taste in clothes and headdress, and the freely imaginative reinvention of the classical repertoire in the architecture make the scenes from the life of Saint Apollonia one of the most fascinating examples of the intermingling between the Gothic tradition and new Renaissance impulses in painting.

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1

The Advent of Reality

6th April 1450 or April 1456 tempera on panel 69 × 39 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Bagnolo Mella, Brescia, c. 1427 Brescia 1515/1516

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Vincenzo Foppa Three Crucifixes The painting is one of Foppa’s first works, executed when the young artist was trying to combine the enchanted world of Gentile da Fabriano with the reenactment of antiquity by Jacopo Bellini and the intense expressiveness of Donatello’s sculpture, which he had encountered in Padua. It is an immensely powerful devotional image, presenting the worshipper with the solitary agony of Christ, accompanied by the two thieves but without the comfort offered by the customary figures of Mary, the Magdalene and Saint John. The light of sunset falls upon the bodies and the harsh landscape of forests and turreted cities. The antique triumphal arch leads the viewer’s gaze into the scene and at the same time softens the emotional involvement, thus favouring a more cerebral approach to the meaning of the Passion.

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The Advent of Reality

c. 1485 - 1490 tempera and gold on canvas 45.5 × 35.5 cm gift of Carlo Marenzi, 1851

Isola di Carturo, Padua, 1431 Mantua 1506

Andrea Mantegna Madonna and Child A promising young artist in the Padua of Donatello and Squarcione, Andrea Mantegna soon became one of the most celebrated painters of his age, a pre-eminence sealed when he moved definitively to the Gonzaga court in Mantua.

The Carrara Madonna and Child dates to the middle of the artist’s career, and was produced after his works for the Camera degli Sposi. This austere yet moving image of motherhood foretells Christ’s future sacrifice on the Cross, alluded to by the red coral bracelet worn by the Child and the Virgin’s distant gaze, tinged with melancholy. The work’s muted colours are the result of Mantegna’s use of tempera, his favourite medium, which he applied in thin layers on a very fine linen canvas.

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Light and Colour in Venice

c. 1472 - 1473 tempera and oil on panel 34 × 27.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice c. 1430 - 1516

Giovanni Bellini (?)

Portrait of a Young Man The portrait is set out as a classical bust and immediately recalls the stern models of Andrea Mantegna, who had married Bellini’s sister Nicolosia. The solid arrangement of volumes and the intense gaze directed at the viewer by the young man attest to an interest in the portraits of Antonello da Messina, active in Venice around 1475.

A fragmentary inscription on the rear (“IACOBUS D”), initially interpreted as a reference to the work’s author, is instead the only faint clue to the identity of the painting’s mysterious subject.

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2

Light and Colour in Venice

1480 oil on panel 64.6 × 45 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Messina c. 1456 Venice (?) before 1488

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Jacopo di Antonello (Jacobello di Antonello) Madonna and Child The painting is the only signed and dated work of Antonello da Messina’s son, and also the only one that can be attributed with certainty. Upon his father’s death in February 1479, Jacobello inherited the workshop and undertook to complete the unfinished works, which probably included the Carrara Madonna and Child. In fact, in the powerfully three-dimensional construction of the faces, in the virtuoso glimpse of the hand holding the cup of transparent glass, and, finally, in the landscape, described with a meticulousness reminiscent of Flemish painting, Jacobello drew on some of the ideas of his father, who, as the scroll resting on the parapet affirms, was “not human”, in other words, truly incomparable.

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Light and Colour in Venice

c. 1487 tempera and oil on panel 84.6 × 65 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Venice c. 1430 - 1516

Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child (Alzano Madonna) This painting is one of the mature masterpieces of Giovanni Bellini, the artist who left an indelible mark on Venetian painting in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The image is distinguished by the relationship between the monumental group of the Madonna and Child and the clear landscape stretching out behind them, in which the hand of another painter was suspected. Mary is clasping the Child in an affectionate embrace that is a kind of heartfelt prayer, and her absorbed gaze reveals that she is aware of her son’s future sacrifice on the Cross. Sitting on the marble parapet is a pear, which, by virtue of its sweetness, is often associated in Christian symbology with the figures of the Madonna and of Jesus as a symbol of the love uniting them.

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2

Light and Colour in Venice

c. 1502 - 1504 oil on canvas 128.5 × 127.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice c. 1465 1525/1526

Vittore Carpaccio and workshop Birth of Mary Carpaccio was the first great exponent of the city view, but also a marvellous painter of interiors, as shown by this painting, in which time seems to stand still. The canvas is part of a series of scenes from the life of Mary produced for the Scuola degli Albanesi in Venice. The Virgin’s mother, St. Anne, is resting after childbirth, assisted by servants and a midwife, who is preparing a bath for the new-born child. Anne’s elderly husband Joachim observes the scene from a slight distance. The story is enriched with apparently secondary but highly symbolic details: the two rabbits nibbling at a cabbage leaf allude to Mary’s virginity; the Hebrew words “Holy Holy Holy in Heaven blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord” ties in with the name of Christ engraved, again in Hebrew characters, on the door jamb.

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2

Light and Colour in Venice

1505 - 1510 tempera and oil on canvas 66 × 58.5 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Vicenza (?) c. 1449 Vicenza 1523

Bartolomeo Montagna (Bartolomeo Cincani) Saint Jerome in Bethlehem

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Trained in Vicenza and Venice, and influenced by the painting of Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina, Montagna was active prevalently in the inland areas of the Veneto. Coexisting in his work is a fondness for inserting the figure into the landscape, typical of the Venetian tradition, and an interest in the Lombard culture of perspective.

Saint Jerome is a fully mature painting showing the artist’s moving efforts to keep up with the innovations of the age without foregoing the pleasure of a detailed narrative. The author of the Latin version of the Bible is not depicted as a religious recluse, or robed in the red attire of a cardinal, but dressed as an abbot and accompanied by the customary lion. Visible behind him is the monastery of Bethlehem, to which the elderly theologian retreated. Men and animals coexist peacefully, intent on their daily tasks, while in the distance the mountains and sky are tinged by the early evening light. The image celebrates the life of the cloister, of which Jerome is seen as a perfect emblem.

The Collectors

Room

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Three Collectors for the Museum: Carrara, Lochis, Morelli

Unlike many Italian municipal museums, established following the suppression of ecclesiastical bodies and the dispersion of aristocratic picture galleries, the patrimony of the Accademia Carrara is the result of a succession of stories, big and small, of enthusiasts who transformed the art of collecting and therefore of possessing into the art of sharing by donating, making the Bergamo picture gallery one of Italy’s most important museums.

Right at the top of the long 240-name list of donors, which includes both private individuals and institutions, are Giacomo Carrara, Guglielmo Lochis and Giovanni Morelli, three great collectors who built up, in different historical periods, important art collections. The varying nature of these collections has contributed to defining the varied and multi-layered character of the Accademia Carrara’s patrimony.

Giacomo Carrara, the founder of the Pinacoteca, spent a lifetime developing his collection, which featured paintings, drawings and prints, in a building which also included a school of painting. Donated to the city in 1796, the collection documented in an exhaustive fashion the history of art in Bergamo from the fifteenth century onwards, but also housed masterpieces of Lombard and Venetian painting.

Guglielmo Lochis established, in his villa at Crocette di Mozzo, just outside Bergamo, an extraordinary collection of paintings, including works by the likes of Bellini, Raphael, Titian, Canaletto and Tiepolo. Set up in order to bear witness to the different Italian artistic schools between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, much of the collection came to the Accademia Carrara in 1866.

With the bequest of Giovanni Morelli in 1891, the museum was enriched by the collection of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest art historians. Morelli devised a new method for the attribution of ancient paintings, based on the analysis of the most seemingly negligible anatomical details. His collection of paintings and sculptures, featuring masterpieces by Pisanello, Bellini and Botticelli, came to the Accademia Carrara after his death.

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Three Collectors for the Museum: Carrara, Lochis, Morelli

1886 oil on canvas 125.5 × 90 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Schrobenhausen 1836 - Munich 1904

Franz von Lenbach Portrait of Senator Giovanni Morelli

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The painting was executed between the spring of 1885 and the winter of 1886, in Rome, in Palazzo Borghese, where Lenbach had a much frequented studio. The brilliant art historian, elected senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1873, is depicted in a three-quarters view, wearing a dark overcoat and top hat; he is in the act of turning his head towards the observer, his gaze lively and penetrating.

The gentleman’s face emerges luminously from the brown background and the black clothing. It is a striking composition, appreciated also by Morelli, who held the German painter in particular esteem and considered him the last heir of the great sixteenth-century tradition of portraiture. With his portraits Lenbach did in fact build an extraordinary career for himself, working not only for many European royal houses but also becoming the official painter of the German aristocracy.

The Renaissance in Central Italy and Flanders

Rooms

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

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Between Tuscany and Flanders Tarot

During the fifteenth century, the cities of Central Italy were distinguished by their thriving artistic production. Florence boasted a glorious figurative tradition and was cautious in its acceptance of the sophisticated, aristocratic language of the final splendid Gothic blaze. With the rise of the Medici family at the beginning of the fifteenth century, there began an extraordinary period of renewal, and the city became the powerhouse of Renaissance innovations. An intensely luminous style of painting, in which space was constructed geometrically through the rules of perspective, and the colours became crisp and bright, took hold. New subjects and iconography drawn from mythology and ancient history enriched artists’ repertoires. The zenith of this exciting period were the years of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with Sandro Botticelli.

Renaissance forms and themes burst onto the scene in Siena as well, but in this proud Tuscan city the link with the Gothic tradition and the taste for precious materials and sophisticated linear rhythms persisted. In the Marches, the court of Montefeltro of Urbino was to the fore in figurative research; Piero della Francesca worked here for some time, and it was a privileged locus for engagement between Italian painting and art from north of the Alps. In Umbria, a region of cultural exchange between different locations in Central Italy, Raphael emerged from the workshop of Perugino.

In the fifteenth century, Flanders and the Netherlands developed a great school of painting as well, the chief centres of which were the flourishing mercantile cities of Bruges and Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels. Extraneous to the fascination for classical antiquity that seduced many Italian artists, Flemish painters concentrated on achieving a faithful representation of reality. Thanks to the use of the new oil painting technique, they proved capable of previously unseen optic subtleties and a meticulous realism, but they also developed a modern sacred iconography to meet the needs of a new and structured bourgeois society.

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

c. 1440 - 1445 tempera and gold on panel 34.7 × 29.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Florence 1420/1421 Pistoia 1497

Benozzo Gozzoli (Benozzo di Lese) Madonna and Child with Angels (Madonna of Humility)

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Benozzo Gozzoli worked in Florence and in various other places around Central Italy, distinguishing himself above all as a fresco painter.

The painting belongs to the artist’s youthful phase, and is still influenced by the precious style of his master Beato Angelico. The iconography is that of the Madonna of Humility, fairly widespread in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury painting. Sitting on a cushion, Mary is holding the Child tight, and he responds to his mother’s affectionate gaze with a caress. Sitting on a marble floor at the feet of the Virgin are two musician angels, while behind her two angels are holding a piece of brocade fabric worked with gold thread. In the background a garden of lilies and roses alludes to the motif of the hortus conclusus, the medieval walled garden symbolizing Mary’s virginity.

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

c. 1470 - 1475 tempera and gold on panel 58.2 × 43.5 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Siena 1447 - before 1500

Neroccio di Bartolomeo de’ Landi Madonna and Child A pupil of Vecchietta in Siena and active for many years alongside Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Neroccio de’ Landi was a skilful wood sculptor and a fine painter. The Madonna and Child is a fine example of this artist’s output and an image of rarefied beauty. Mary’s hand is delicately brushing against that of Jesus, whose gaze is directed towards his mother, while his reddened cheeks indicate the emotion of their embrace. The work remains true to the Sienese Gothic tradition, with its taste for gold, sinuous design and subtle layers of colour. But coexisting alongside it is the reworking of some innovations from the Florentine Renaissance. The athletic stance and classical-style anatomy of the Child derive from Donatello, as does the taste for realistic detail: the shadow cast by the Child and the brackets supporting the stone slabs of the parapet.

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

c. 1475 - 1480 tempera and gold on panel 52 × 39 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Florence 1446 - 1498

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Francesco Botticini Tobias and the Archangel Raphael The depicted episode comes from the Book of Tobit, in the Old Testament, which tells the story of a Jewish man named Tobit and his son Tobias, in exile in Nineveh. The painting show Tobias, accompanied by the Archangel Raphael, as they are travelling to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of Media. The young man is holding the miraculous fish caught in the river Tigris, which will enable him to defeat the demon Asmodeus and to marry Sarah, his beloved, and also to heal his father Tobit from blindness.

In Florence the story of Tobias was particularly popular among merchants and travellers, and Botticini, who was a member of the Compagnia dell’Arcangelo Raffaele, based in Santo Spirito, produced various versions of it, including this one for private devotion. By virtue of the fluidity of the drawing and the dreamy expression of the faces, the painting can be dated to the years in which the artist was most influenced by the painting of Sandro Botticelli, who studied alongside him in the workshop of Verrocchio.

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

c. 1499 - 1500 tempera, oil and gold on panel 83.5 × 162 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Florence 1445 - 1510

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi) The Story of Virginia the Roman In the Florence of the second half of the fifteenth century, Botticelli embodied the highly refined atmosphere of the Medici circles around Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the interest in themes from antiquity. The Carrara painting was executed in the artist’s final period. Originally it served as a backrest, set inside wood or leather cladding covering the walls of a private space. It depicts an episode from Roman history narrated by Livy. Botticelli chose to juxtapose the different moments of the story, which celebrates the female virtues of honour and chastity defended at the cost of life. The decemvir Appius Claudius, enamoured of the young Virginia, already promised to the tribune Lucius Icilius, instructs Marcus Claudius to abduct her, and to make out that she was a runaway slave of his.

Defended by onlookers, Virginia is led before the court, presided over by Appius himself, who declares her to be the slave of Marcus. The father, Lucius Verginius, strikes her dead to prevent her honour being stained. The narrative ends with the relatives’ pain and the expulsion of the decemvirs from Rome.

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The Renaissance in Central Italy

c. 1502 - 1503 tempera and oil on panel 45.5 × 36 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Urbino 1483 Rome 1520

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) Saint Sebastian

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Born in Urbino and initially active in the workshop of Perugino, Raphael worked in Siena, perhaps as an assistant to Pintoricchio, before becoming fully established in Florence in the first years of the sixteenth century.

The Saint Sebastian was painted when Raphael was not yet twenty, but it stands out for its extraordinary technical finesse and an almost miraculous rendering of the gradations of light, which envelop the figure in a soft, dreamlike atmosphere. The work was realized for the private devotions of a sophisticated client, which explains why a saint like Sebastian, generally associated with popular piety, is depicted by the artist in aristocratic dress, holding in his hand an arrow to symbolize martyrdom, instead of naked and pierced by arrows, as envisaged by traditional iconography.

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Between Tuscany and Flanders

c. 1405 tempera and gold on panel 33 × 23 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Florence, documented from 1391 to 1422

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Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni) Vir Dolorum (Pietà) Lorenzo Monaco, a monk in the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, was one of the leading exponents of the Late Gothic style in early fifteenth-century Florence.

The refined language that flourished in courts across Europe was developed by the artist in a devotional sense, in formulas of abstract elegance.

The Carrara panel depicts the popular theme of the Pietà.

The Dead Christ protrudes from the tomb, his head reclining and hands crossed on his bust, while the Cross is rising up in the background. The image has a radical simplicity of composition and still draws inspiration from late thirteenth-century iconographic models. This deliberate archaism can be seen above all in the simplified design of the anatomic features and of the face, in the calligraphic execution of the hair, stressing the highly devotional nature of the painting.

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Between Tuscany and Flanders

1480 - 1485 oil on panel 40.2 × 33 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Bruges, second half of the fifteenth century

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Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula Portrait of a Young Man The portrait is attributed to an anonymous painter active in Bruges in the final decades of the fifteenth century, and conventionally known as the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula. The most important work by this artist is in fact a large polyptych depicting stories from the life of the saint, held in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges.

The young man is represented in a half-figure pose, with the head turned three quarters, in front of dark velvet hangings. Opening up behind him is a landscape with a city overlooking a stretch of water and animated by slender knight figures. The painting’s general compositional structure and the analytic realism of the details of the face and landscape are inspired by the works of Hans Memling, a fine artist of German origin who had a flourishing workshop in Bruges.

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Tarot

c. 1455 - 1460; c. 1485 - 1490 tempera on paper with silver and gold 17.6 × 8.7 cm (each card) gift of Francesco Baglioni, 1900

Cremona, documented from 1444 to 1477 Cremona, documented from 1450 to 1482 Cremona, documented from 1480 to 1516

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Bonifacio Bembo and Ambrogio Bembo; Antonio Cicognara Twenty-six Playing Cards and Tarot Tarot cards are playing cards of uncertain origin, but very popular in the courts of Northern Italy during the fifteenth century. A deck consists of fifty-six cards divided into four suits (pentacles, cups, swords and wands), and twenty-two illustrated cards with human and animal figures that have symbolic meanings, formerly called “Trumps”.

The Colleoni-Baglioni deck, now divided between the Accademia Carrara, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and a private collection, is one of the most complete to come down to us. The client was probably Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan from 1450 to 1466. The deck was primarily created by Bonifacio Bembo, one of the leading exponents of the Late Gothic in Lombardy, perhaps with the help of his brother Ambrogio, while Antonio Cicognara produced three cards at a later date to replace ones that may have been lost or damaged.

Venice and the Mainland in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century

Rooms

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The School of Giovanni Bellini

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The Sacred Conversation

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Identifying Saints

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On the Altars of Bergamo

In the Renaissance, artists learned their craft by apprenticing in the workshops of experienced and wellestablished masters. Their training involved a gradual progression of roles and tasks, from the preparation of colours to direct collaboration with the master of the workshop. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many generations of painters who came above all from Venice’s inland territories trained in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, the important one then existing on the lagoon. After completing their training and work experience, the young artists embarked on independent careers in the city or their places of origin, spreading the key values of Venetian painting on the mainland.

Various types of work were produced in Bellini’s workshop, and for a range of purposes. Initially, church altars were decorated with majestic polyptychs of the Gothic tradition: complex works organized into many registers and consisting of various panels depicting saints, martyrs and church fathers. Gradually polyptychs were replaced by single-surface altarpieces, often featuring one of the most widespread compositions in Renaissance painting, the Sacred Conversation. The general scheme was for the Madonna and Child to be in the centre, in a raised position on a dais or throne, surrounded by saints and sometimes patrons. The scene was set in a unified architectural space and the characters represented in full figure. This new iconography spread through Venice thanks precisely to Giovanni Bellini, who invented the half-figure Sacred Conversation. The size of the painting was reduced and the format became horizontal; the characters were no longer placed in a church setting, but in a natural landscape.

There was also greater interaction between them, due to an affectionate gestural quality that bound them to each other. Created to meet the devotional needs of an aristocratic clientele, the Sacred Conversation in half figures eventually established itself as the very image of Venetian painting.

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The School of Giovanni Bellini

1505 oil on panel 47 × 37.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice or Cremona (?) c. 1480 Venice c. 1531

Bartolomeo Veneto Madonna and Child Active in the Veneto, Emilia and Lombardy at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bartolomeo Veneto is known for his portraits, which show great care in the rendering of costume. His devotional work, to which he dedicated himself above all at the beginning of his career, is less well known. The Carrara painting is one of the artist’s most youthful works, and was executed in 1505, when Bartolomeo had not long finished his apprenticeship in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini. The pose of the Madonna and of the Child Jesus are taken from one of the master’s models, used by pupils on various occasions. The landscape, perhaps a depiction of Monselice Castle near Padua, is also based on ideas from Bellini, while the sharp delineation of the profiles, the accurate representation of the background and the shining colours reveal the interest in northern art that was characteristic of Bartolomeo’s painting.

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The School of Giovanni Bellini

1521 oil on panel 84 × 67 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Venice c. 1470/1475 after 1530

Marco Basaiti Portrait of a Gentleman in Black

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Marco Basaiti is a little-known exponent of Venetian painting, active in the period straddling the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The Carrara gentleman is one of his masterpieces in the field of the portrait, a genre to which he devoted great energy. The name of the artist and the date 1521 are indicated in the inscription “m. baxiti. f. mdxxi”, now barely legible on the rock in the background, while there are no clues as to the identity of the subject, almost certainly a Venetian aristocrat. The work is from the final phase of the artist’s career, and is influenced by the portraiture of Giorgione and his followers, as testified by the imposing nature of the figure and the attempt to psychologically characterize the subject, who has a stern look and is clasping his gloves with determination.

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The Sacred Conversation

1511 - 1513 oil on panel 89.5 × 118.5 cm gift of Francesco Baglioni, 1900

Brembate di Sopra (?), Bergamo, c. 1480 - Bergamo 1528

Andrea Previtali Madonna and Child between Saints Jerome and Anne Like many young talents from the mainland, the Bergamoborn painter Andrea Previtali trained in Venice in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini. He stayed on the lagoon for about a decade, before returning to his home city, where he received many commissions and was influenced by the presence of Lorenzo Lotto. The Baglioni Madonna is perhaps one of the first works produced by the artist after his return to Bergamo, towards 1511. The painting deals with the Renaissance theme of the Sacred Conversation, with the Virgin in the centre surrounded by saints.

The composition is based on Bellini’s models, both in the use of the horizontal format and in the choice to set the figures within a bright natural landscape occupied on the right by the ruins of a classical-style building.

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Identifying Saints

1506 oil on panel 125 × 51 cm 124.5 × 59.5 cm 124.5 × 51.5 cm gift of Giovanni Piccinelli, 1908

Santa Croce, Bergamo, 1470/1475 Venice 1508

Francesco di Simone da Santacroce Saint John the Baptist Saint James the Greater Saint Alexander Francesco da Santacroce was the founder of a family of painters active in Venice for over a century. Being part of the community of Bergamaschi resident in the city guaranteed the artist many commissions in his home city, including the Carrara triptych from the parish of Lepreno in Val Serina. The inscription on the pilgrim’s staff of Saint James the Greater conveys the name of the work’s clients: Alessandro di Antonio, Alessandro “the Servant”, Giovanni di Bartolomeo and Ponzio di Gerolamo, probably priors of the church of Lepreno. The scheme of the painting picks up on that of the triptych produced by his master, Giovanni Bellini, for the Venetian church of San Cristoforo della Pace. The shameless use of innovations by more able artists was not unusual on Francesco’s part, and it would become the hallmark of the Santacroce’s later activity.

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On the Altars of Bergamo

1517 tempera on panel 188 × 148 cm acquired from the Church of Sant’Agata, 1858

Bergamo, documented from 1490 to 1527

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Antonio Boselli Saint Lawrence between Saints John the Baptist and Barnabas The large panel was originally on the high altar in the Church of San Lorenzino in Bergamo, which was knocked down in 1561 to make way for city walls built by the Venetians. The altarpiece forms part of the mature output of Boselli, who worked in the Bergamo area as a fresco painter and as the author of religious artworks. The artist was the figure most to the fore in resisting the gradual establishment of Venetian figurative culture in the city, a process definitely sealed by the arrival of Lorenzo Lotto.

The painting contains a mixture of references to the Milanese perspective tradition and to ancient Lombard culture, evident in the spatial construction of the scene and in the detail of the oculi with clypeate heads. References can also be seen to the painting of Bernardo Zenale and to Leonardesque models, for example in the slightly reclined head of Saint John the Baptist.

Schools. Northern Italy Between the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Rooms

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Milan and Lombardy

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The School of Leonardo

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Piedmont

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Bologna and Ferrara

One of the distinctive features of Italian figurative culture is the great variety and wealth of styles that distinguish the numerous towns and cities scattered throughout Italy.

As with the dialects in the spoken language, the languages of artistic forms acquired a particular intonation in the different regions, giving rise to traditions or schools that reflected the cultural and political leanings of the patrons and the experiences of the artists themselves.

In Milan, the presence of a court with international tastes, like that of the Sforza, determined a tenacious and longstanding loyalty towards the Late Gothic style. Renaissance renewal entered the local tradition through two fine artists, Vincenzo Foppa and Ambrogio Bergognone, but it was the arrival of Leonardo da Vinci in the city that marked a decisive turning point. Thanks to the sfumato technique, the Florentine artist infused his paintings with a previously unknown softness and naturalness, while his scientific study of anatomy led him to depict the inner motions of the soul with a new sensibility. Many pupils and assistants gathered around him and continued his work, but the revolutionary innovations of his painting were acknowledged by other artists as well, who reworked the master’s achievements in their own personal way.

Of the artistic schools in the Italian Renaissance, that of Piedmont is one of the least known. French and Flemish influences arriving from across the Alps and through the ports of Liguria combined with local trends, but Lombard painting was also of great importance, and indelibly shaped the work of Gaudenzio Ferrari.

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Towards the end of the fifteenth and in the early years of the sixteenth century, Bologna and Ferrara were the centres of a surprising flourishing of the arts that involved Emilia and Romagna. In Bologna, Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Francia directed artists toward a softly classical style, opposed only

by Amico Aspertini, a painter with an eccentric vein. In Ferrara, with the advent of Duke Alfonso I d’Este, the city experienced an extraordinary phase, favoured by the refined court atmosphere. Mazzolino, Garofalo and the two Dossi brothers developed a style of painting with marked fablelike overtones and a richly imaginative inventiveness.

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Milan and Lombardy

c. 1492 - 1495 tempera grassa and gold on panel 62 × 46.8 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Milan (?); documented in Pavia from 1491; Milan before 1525

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Bramantesque Master (Bernardino Bergognone?)

Madonna Lactans (Nursing Madonna) The painting combines two widespread themes, the Madonna of the Rose, evoked by the rose garden behind the Virgin, and the Nursing Madonna. Mary breastfeeding was one of the most popular and appreciated iconographic images in religious circles, and the artist produced a version of poignant beauty, deploying a limited range of colours: the silvery grey of the complexions, the browns of the landscape, the blue of the Virgin’s cloak. The slice of city life depicted in the background is memorable, as is the domestic naturalistic detail of the ducks placidly swimming in the stream in the foreground. In these details the anonymous author of the painting - called Bramantesque Master and perhaps identifiable with Bernardino, brother of Ambrogio Bergognone - reveals his character as a poetic interpreter of the Lombard landscape.

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The School of Leonardo

1503 - 1505 tempera and oil on paper stuck onto a panel 39 × 31.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Milan 1465/1477 - c. 1524

Andrea Solario Ecce Homo

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Of the many Lombard artists seduced by Leonardo, Solario was the one who proved best able to elaborate the teachings of the Tuscan master without giving up his own original language, into which various different experiences flowed: the colouristic tradition of the Veneto, encountered as a young man in Venice, and an interest in Flemish painting, explored during his years in France.

The Ecce Homo dates to the time when Solario was engaging most closely with Leonardo, to the extent that some have seen in his figure of Christ a reference to the one painted in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

The devotional quality of the image, the purpose of which was to stir pity and compassion in the viewer, is emphasized by the meticulous execution and the intense humanity of Christ’s suffering face emerging from the dark background.

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The School of Leonardo

c. 1508 oil on panel diameter 54 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Milan 1467 - 1516

Giovan Antonio Boltraffio Madonna Lactans (Nursing Madonna) Boltraffio was Leonardo’s main pupil in Milan, and worked in his workshop for many years. Subsequently, while remaining true to his master’s teaching, he developed his own personal style and specialized in portraits.

A very appealing work, due to the skilful use of light and the harmonious line of the volumes, the Nursing Madonna belongs to Boltraffio’s late output, and combines in a balanced synthesis the artist’s different experiences: Leonardesque sfumato, the nuances of the sweet and devout painting of Francesco Francia and the geometric abstractions of Bramantino. The subject picks up a theme of medieval origin that would be completely abandoned with the Counter-Reformation because it was considered unsuitable.

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Piedmont

c. 1520 oil and tempera on panel 47 × 30 cm 47 × 30 cm gift of Francesco Baglioni, 1900

Western Piedmont, documented from 1509 to 1535

Defendente Ferrari Flagellation of Christ Christ in Meditation, Sitting on the Cross There is not much certain information regarding Defendente Ferrari, a fine artist informed both by the fifteenth-century Piedmontese figurative tradition and by painting from north of the Alps. Many of his works have been conserved, almost all from the territories of the Duchy of Savoy.

The two Carrara panels acted as moveable wings of a triptych with, in the centre, a Crucifixion now held in the collections of Palazzo Madama in Turin. Probably designed for private devotion, it explores the theme of the Passion of Christ by inserting an episode of northern derivation, that of the stripped Christ meditating upon his forthcoming sacrifice, while a hireling finishes preparing the cross.

The careful technique and executive finesse, the enamelled quality of the colours and the taste for detailed narrative characterize this work and the painter’s style in general.

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Bologna and Ferrara

c. 1480-1481 tempera, oil and gold on panel, transposed onto canvas 81.3 ×54.8 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Ferrara 1460 Mantua 1535

Lorenzo Costa Saint John the Evangelist After training in his home city of Ferrara, Lorenzo Costa worked for a long time in Bologna for the ruling Bentivoglio family, and then in Mantua, where, following Mantegna’s death, he took over as the Gonzaga court painter.

The Carrara painting belongs to the artist’s youthful period and is the sole surviving fragment of a large altarpiece whose original location and overall appearance is unknown. The rigorous perspectival construction of the architecture and the clear definition of the figure of the Evangelist suggest the work was painted in the early 1480s, perhaps immediately after Costa’s move to Bologna (1483), when the artist was still influenced by what he had learnt in Ferrara, in particular from Francesco del Cossa, who had died not longer before.

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Bologna and Ferrara

c. 1515 - 1516 oil on panel 52.5 × 35 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Ferrara c. 1476 - 1559

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Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi) Madonna Enthroned between Saints Sebastian and Roch Garofalo was one of the chief exponents of the Ferrara school in the first half of the sixteenth century. His style was rooted solidly in the city’s figurative tradition, but was enriched by different influences: the colours of the Venetian artists and the work of Raphael in particular.

The Carrara work was produced in a quite specific phase of the artist’s career: the years of his collaboration with Dosso Dossi on the execution of the Costabili polyptych, now in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara. The two painters engaged closely, and Garofalo was involved by his young colleague in the fashion for the painting of Giorgione, which spread through the Po plain after the death of the great Venetian artist. In the composition of the small Bergamo painting there are in fact echoes of Giorgione’s celebrated Castelfranco altarpiece, while the lively and restless execution reveals the influence of Dosso.

The High and Late Renaissance

Rooms

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The Renaissance in Europe

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Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani

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Venetian Painting of the Early Sixteenth Century

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Giovan Battista Moroni

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Venetian Painting in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

In the first decades of the sixteenth century in Venice, Titian completed Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione’s investigation of light and colour in highly balanced compositions. The artist’s majestic altarpieces, seductive paintings on mythological themes, and solemn portraits won over the Venetian and European aristocracy. Shortly after the middle of the century, the elderly and wellestablished master was joined by major new figures like Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano.

In the meantime, lively local schools had developed in the mainland cities, capable of engaging independently with the ideas coming out of Venice. In Bergamo, in particular, Lorenzo Lotto was active for about a decade, definitively honing his style and changing the course of the Lombard city’s pictorial history. Lotto’s restless life and the moving force of his paintings made the artist one of the most sensitive interpreters of the religious crisis that shook Europe with the Lutheran Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Andrea Previtali and Cariani, both born in Bergamo but who had developed artistically in Venice, were also working in Bergamo in the same years. Previtali cultivated a simple, very colourful style of painting, still bound to fifteenth-century schemes, while Cariani brought the innovations of Giorgione and Titian to the city, setting up a dialogue between the Venetian colouristic tradition and Lombard realism.

One painter who stood out on the Bergamo artistic scene in the second half of the sixteenth century was Giovan Battista Moroni. A pupil and assistant of Moretto in Brescia, and active for several years in Trento, he spent the rest of his life between Bergamo and his home town of Albino.

The author of altarpieces and devotional paintings, he is however famous above all for his portraits. He displayed an extraordinary ability to capture with truth and immediacy the details of the costume, appearance and expression of his subjects, rendering them natural and life-like.

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The Renaissance in Europe

c. 1533 - 1535 oil on panel 24 × 21 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Brussels 1480 - Paris 1541

Jean Clouet Portrait of Louis de Clèves

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Originally from Flanders, in 1516 Jean Clouet started to work in the service of the king of France, Francis I, distinguishing himself with portraits of gentlemen and ladies linked to the court. These paintings were executed on small wooden supports, using fairly simple and repetitive schemes, but accurately rendering the physiognomy of the subjects.

The Carrara portrait is a fine example of this output, and depicts Louis de Clèves (1495-1545), lord of Nevers and Count of Auxerre, second child of Engilbert de Clèves and Charlotte de Bourbon-Vendôme. Clouet constructed the work around the contrast between the nobleman’s distant gaze and the extraordinarily life-like detail of the hands resting on the parapet, an idea already present in two preparatory pastel drawings in the Musée Condé in Chantilly.

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Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani

1517 - 1520 oil on panel 48 × 37.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Fuipiano al Brembo, Bergamo, c. 1485/1490 Venice after 1547

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Cariani (Giovanni Busi) Redeemer with the Cross Cariani moved to Bergamo in August 1517 to paint a large altarpiece for the Church of San Gottardo. He remained there until 1523, producing various works, in which he reached the height of his artistic maturity.

The Redeemer with the Cross dates to the beginning of his sojourn in Bergamo. The painting must originally have belonged to Leonino Brembati, the husband of Lucina Brembati, the woman depicted by Lorenzo Lotto in a celebrated work also at the Accademia Carrara. Cariani used the iconographic scheme of Christ carrying the Cross, very popular at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Northern Italian painting. However, Christ is not shown as suffering, with a crown of thorns on his way to Calvary, but is represented in the guise of the Redeemer of humanity, triumphing over death.

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Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani

c. 1518 - 1520 oil on canvas 84.4 × 84 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Fuipiano al Brembo, Bergamo, c. 1485/1490 Venice after 1547

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Cariani (Giovanni Busi) Portrait of Giovanni Benedetto Caravaggi In the years of his stay in Bergamo, Cariani forged relations with the nobility of Crema, receiving commissions for several paintings. Belonging to this group of works is the Portrait of Giovanni Benedetto Caravaggi. The crest and spurious inscription on the drape offer reliable information about the subject, who belonged to a family of literati and graduated from the University of Padua in medicine and philosophy. Caravaggi is presented as a humanist, leafing through a heavy manuscript volume; unfolding behind him is a wide landscape infused with the rosy light of sunset.

The organization of the painting recalls the portraiture of Giorgione and Titian in particular, but the soft realism of the face and hands is typical of Cariani. The artist also did a portrait of Giovanni Benedetto Caravaggi’s older brother, Giovanni Antonio, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

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Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani

c. 1521 - 1523 oil on panel 53.5 × 44.5 cm acquired from the Countess Degnamerita Grumelli Albani, 1882

Venice c. 1480 Loreto, Ancona, 1556/1557

Lorenzo Lotto Portrait of Lucina Brembati Lotto arrived in Bergamo in May 1513, to work on a commission for a large altarpiece for the Church of Saints Stephen and Dominic, and stayed in the city until around 1525. His years here represented a period of synthesis of his youthful experiences in Venice, Treviso, Recanati and Rome.

The Portrait of Lucina Brembati is emblematic of this phase, and one of Lotto’s masterpieces of portraiture. The crest of the Brembati family on one of the rings and the rebus consisting of the letters “CI” which, inscribed within the centre of the luna, form the name of Lucina, permit the identification of the lady as the wife of Leonino Brembati.

Lucina is sumptuously clothed, and an elaborate headdress known as a capigliara gathers together her hair; the gold hook-shaped pendant probably served as a toothpick.

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Lorenzo Lotto and Giovanni Cariani

1523 oil on canvas 189 × 134 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Venice c. 1480 Loreto, Ancona, 1556/1557

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Lorenzo Lotto Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with the client Niccolò Bonghi The painting, signed and dated 1523 on the wooden footrest, is one of the most celebrated works produced

by Lotto during his period in Bergamo. The canvas was commissioned by the merchant Niccolò Bonghi, the owner of the house near San Michele al Pozzo Bianco in which the artist lived. It depicts the scene of the mystic marriage of Saint Catherine with the Christ Child, but Lotto interpreted the traditional iconographic scheme with great personality, inserting into the position normally occupied by Saint Joseph the figure of Niccolò Bonghi.

A chaste sweetness colours the faces of Mary and Catherine, dressed in opulent and brightly coloured attire, but what really catches the eye is the highly studied play of hands. The neutral grey surface behind the sacred group substitutes the original background scene, probably a landscape featuring Mount Sinai.

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Venetian Painting of the Early Sixteenth Century

c. 1507 oil on panel 38 × 48 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Pieve di Cadore, Belluno, c.

1488/1490 Venice 1576

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Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) Madonna and Child in a Landscape Titian dominated a long and extraordinary period in Venetian art, exerting a deep influence on many generations of artists. His painting is based on the expressive power of colour, a quality that characterizes both the limpid and harmonious paintings of his youth and maturity, and the dramatic works of his old age.

The Carrara Madonna is one of the artist’s first works, and shows how in those years Titian was engaging closely with Giorgione and another youthful talent, Sebastiano del Piombo. The figures are not in the centre of the composition, but are off to the right and immersed in a vast natural landscape. The Virgin has a new and surprising stature, wrought with vibrant, sensual colours, which define the forms not through the design but by way of broad fields of colour.

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Venetian Painting of the Early Sixteenth Century

c. 1513 oil on panel 58 × 48 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Cremona 1490/1491 before 1543

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Altobello Melone Portrait of a Gentleman Altobello Melone was one of the leading exponents of the sixteenth-century Cremona school. He trained in Cremona and Venice, but decisive to the maturing of his style was his encounter with Girolamo Romanino and a liking for northern prints.

The Carrara painting is one of the painter’s most celebrated works, and for a long time was believed to be a portrait of Cesare Borgia, known as Valentino. It depicts a nobleman with a proud gaze, against the background of a stormy landscape being crossed by two mysterious figures. The image is based on the portraiture of Giorgione and the young Titian, though the artist was familiar with it through the sentimental interpretation offered in those years by Romanino. Altobello chose the range of cold colours: the silvery hues of the sky, the olive green of the landscape, the petrol blue of the subject’s attire.

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Venetian Painting of the Early Sixteenth Century

c. 1520 oil on panel 71 × 99 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Serina, Bergamo, c. 1480 - Venice 1528

Palma il Vecchio (Jacopo Negretti) Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene In the ambit of Venetian Renaissance painting, Palma il Vecchio was first and foremost the author of solemn sacred conversations set in natural landscapes, and of sensual female figures. These two types of small-format painting were widespread in Venice, but the contribution of the Bergamo-born artist was fundamental to their becoming established.

In the Carrara painting, Palma took from Bellini the traditional scheme of the sacred conversation. However, the figures are not isolated from each other, silently meditating upon the Holy Scriptures, but are engaging in an animated dialogue. The springing pose of the Child, leaning towards the unguent jar, triggers a motion that affects all the characters, linking them indissolubly.

Also new is the imposing stature of the Virgin and of the Magdalene, who, in their blooming beauty, evoke the healthy-looking female half figures that feature in many of the artist’s subsequent works.

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Giovan Battista Moroni

1570 - 1573 oil on canvas 40 × 32 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Albino, Bergamo, c. 1520/1524 - 1579

Giovan Battista Moroni Portrait of a Girl from the Redetti Household Moroni is famous above all for his portraits, which stand out for the penetrating observation of physical features and their psychological immediacy. The Girl from the Redetti Household is one of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, and one of the most familiar images for visitors to the Accademia Carrara. It is a half-figure portrait of a child, dressed like a lady of her age, with a brocade outer dress, under which a pure white undergarment can be seen. In the contrast between the refined elegance of the clothing and the veiled melancholy in the gaze of the girl, not particularly intimidated by the role she is forced to play, the painting displays its coherence with the artist’s mature works, in which the decision to opt for a natural and strongly resembling portraiture emerges quite radically.

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Giovan Battista Moroni

c. 1576 oil on canvas 97 × 80 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1796

Albino, Bergamo, c. 1520/1524 - 1579

Giovan Battista Moroni Portrait of an Elderly Seated Man (Pietro Spino?)

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The painting is a masterpiece of Moroni’s later years, the result of a profound reflection on this scheme of portraiture. The Dantesque chair on which the elderly gentleman is seated is positioned on a slight diagonal so as to effectively convey the sense of depth. He is wearing a fur-lined outer garment and is clasping the armrest with his right hand, while in his left he is holding a small book. He has just stopped reading and is looking out proudly towards us, fixing us with a questioning gaze.

The extensive background enhances the psychological intensity of the portrait, which makes use of a highly selected range of greys, browns and blacks. The depicted figure has not yet been identified, though it has been suggested he is Pietro Spino, a historian and man of letters who came from Albino, like the artist.

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Venetian Painting in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

c. 1542 oil on canvas 74 × 54 cm gift of Mario Frizzoni, 1966

Bassano del Grappa, Vicenza, c. 1510 1592

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Jacopo Bassano (Jacopo Da Ponte) Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist Jacopo Bassano was the main exponent of a family of painters from Bassano del Grappa. His sacred works are packed with naturalistic motifs and situations drawn from everyday life, and he is considered to be the inventor of the pastoral scene.

The Frizzoni Madonna is a relatively youthful work, and bears witness to the artist’s complex training and experimental temperament. The Virgin is embracing Jesus Christ and Saint John the Baptist, forming a compact monumental group that occupies the majority of the available space. These were the years in which the innovations of Mannerism were reaching Venice, and Bassano displays his receptiveness to these new ideas.

This is also attested by the Carrara canvas, with its elongated figures, elegant and sinuous design, and cold, metallic colours.

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Venetian Painting in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

c. 1558 oil on canvas 80.5 × 80.5 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Treviso 1500 Venice 1571

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Paris Bordon Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena Presented by the Virgin to the Saviour Paris Bordon was active between Venice and Treviso, but he also worked outside the borders of the Serenissima: in Augsburg in Germany, in Milan, and at Fontainebleau in France. His painting was initially influenced by Titian, and then by his interest in the elegant formulas of Mannerism.

Specially known for his sensual mythological allegories, Bordon received numerous commissions for religious works as well. The painting in the Accademia Carrara belongs to this ambit, and should be associated with the artist’s production for the Dominican nuns of San Paolo in Treviso. A broad landscape and supranatural sky of golden clouds provide the setting for the mystic vision of Saint Catherine. The canvas is the expression of a devout spirituality, which in the middle of the sixteenth century was spreading amongst defenders of Catholic orthodoxy.

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The Triumph of Painting. The Age of Baroque and Rococo

Rooms

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Between Naturalism and Classicism

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Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

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Fra Galgario and Portraiture Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

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Eighteenth-Century Painting in Venice

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Genre Painting: Still Lifes, Landscapes and Cityscapes

Seventeenth and eighteenth century painting was marked throughout Europe by the encounter between Naturalism and Classicism. The two trends originated in Rome in the early seventeenth century, thanks to Michelangelo Merisi, also known as Caravaggio, and Annibale Carracci. Both abandoned the abstract subtleties of Mannerist painting.

Caravaggio painted the truth of things as they appeared, while Carracci sought a classic beauty, simplicity of form and harmonious composition. Followers and students spread the achievements of these great masters to every corner of Italy and the continent, adapting them to local and national traditions and their own experiences.

During the seventeenth century, the social context in which the artists were working changed radically. In Italy and the countries that remained faithful to Catholicism, a significant part of the artistic production was still reserved for religious works destined for church altars or private devotion. In Protestant countries there was less demand for sacred works and the artists worked on other themes, in which they became true specialists. The genres were then born: still life, landscapes, and battle scenes. The works are no longer created for a specific customer, but were subject to public tastes and the harsh judgement of the market.

During the eighteenth century the Venetian painters conquered Europe again. In the field of large fresco decoration, one painter who excelled was Giovan Battista Tiepolo, but along with him there were also those who specialized in cityscapes, such as Canaletto, Bellotto and Guardi, and scenes of everyday life or genre painting, such as Pietro Longhi. In the field of portraiture, the Bergamo artist Fra Galgario excelled, combining the exuberance of the Venetian tradition with the Lombard vocation for a true and faithful representation of reality.

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Between Naturalism and Classicism

1640 - 1650 oil on canvas 72 × 61 cm gift of Antonietta Noli Marenzi, 1901

Amersfoort c. 1600 Sicily (?) post 1650

Matthias Stomer Man with a Lit Candle and Wine Carafe Stomer was one of the main Dutch followers of Caravaggio.

He trained in Utrecht, where an important Caravaggesque school had developed, but he worked mostly in Italy, the country to which he moved in his early twenties.

The Carrara painting is a significant example of the artist’s work. He preferred night environments, lit by candlelight.

These belong to the figure or genre scenes: representations of individuals and situations drawn from everyday life that became a specialty of the followers of Caravaggio and Stomer in particular. Often these paintings could conceal allegorical meanings: in Man with a Lit Candle and Wine Carafe it is thought that there might be an image of Autumn or Taste. The museum also holds its pendant depicting a Young Man who Lights a Candle.

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Between Naturalism and Classicism

1640 - 1650 oil on canvas 47 × 37 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Sassoferrato, Ancona, 1609 Rome 1685

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Sassoferrato (Giovan Battista Salvi) Madonna in Prayer Sassoferrato is best known for his vast number of devotional paintings. His works are characterized by the purist elegance of form, the glazed surfaces and the impeccable quality of execution. The image of Mary is of fundamental importance in the painter’s repertoire, and he created countless versions of this subject. The iconography is borrowed from a work, now lost, of the Bolognese Guido Reni, who was a constant point of reference for the artist from the Marche. In the sweetness of the expression, the yearning for a return to an ideal and timeless beauty, Sassoferrato intentionally drew inspiration from the paintings of Perugino and Raphael, with an early revival of the devotional theme.

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Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

c. 1635 oil on panel 71 × 54.3 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Haarlem, c. 1610 - 1668

Jan Miense Molenaer Young Man Smoking

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Molenaer trained in Haarlem, but worked primarily in Amsterdam, where he devoted himself almost exclusively to genre subjects, depicting the lives of the poor, the peasants and the Dutch petty bourgeoisie merchant class.

As part of this repertoire, the smoker was a very popular theme and often meant as a warning not to indulge in hedonistic pleasures.

With a pipe in his mouth and an empty glass in his left hand, Molenaer’s young man watches us with an absorbed gaze, stretching his legs to warm them before the fireplace.

On the table covered with a cloth are a snuffbox, a pewter jug ​​and another pipe. The artist does not dwell on the harmful consequences of the vice, but on the figure of this thoughtful young man. It seems to offer a reflection on the fleeting nature of life, comparable to the ethereal quality of the smoke vanishing into the air.

21

Fra Galgario and Portraiture Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

c. 1654 oil on canvas 111 × 93 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

San Giovanni Bianco, Bergamo, 1609 Bergamo 1679

85

Carlo Ceresa Portrait of Jacopo Tiraboschi Carlo Ceresa was one of the leading seventeenth-century artists in Bergamo’s extraordinary portrait tradition that developed over several centuries under the banner of frank and sincere realism.

The Portrait of Jacopo Tiraboschi is a typical example of the artist’s work. The elderly gentleman was from Serina and belonged to one of the most prominent families of this town, located in the Bergamo valley. Ceresa shows him seated on a chair covered in red velvet, against a lead grey background. His hands are firmly grasping the armrests and his face, with its gruff and stern expression, is painted with ruthless precision. The sheer simplicity of the setting and the austere execution are the salient features of this painting, and more generally of Ceresa’s rigorous eye.

21

Fra Galgario and Portraiture Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

1737 oil on canvas 93 × 82 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Bergamo 1655 - 1743

Fra Galgario (Vittore Ghislandi) Portrait of Francesco Maria Bruntino

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In the memorable gallery of gentlemen and ladies of Bergamo and Lombard society portrayed by Fra Galgario, the face of Francesco Maria Bruntino, with his grim and even unfriendly expression, remains one of the most unforgettable portraits. Bruntino came from humble origins and was an original figure, a merchant and lover of paintings who spent his life collecting and trading paintings, prints and rare books. Fra Galgario shows him dressed somewhat carelessly, his elbow leaning against a pillar, on which some books and a plaster mask are placed haphazardly. The painting is one of the artist’s mature works and one of his most famous portraits for the balance achieved between the chromatically exuberant uncostrained execution, and the ability to immortalize the model’s personality on the canvas with implacable rigour.

21

Fra Galgario and Portraiture Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

c. 1732 oil on canvas 78 × 66 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Bergamo 1655 - 1743

Fra Galgario (Vittore Ghislandi) Portrait of a Young Painter The workshop of Fra Galgario was frequented by young people eager to learn the secrets of the trade and a good number of his paintings depict boys with whom the artist seems to have been quite familiar. These models are often dressed bizarrely with extravagant outfits and hats, or they are posing as painters, like the young man in the portrait from the Carrara, which is a masterpiece of this particular kind of work by the artist. The arrogant attitude of the teenager, who proudly rests his left hand on his hip and holds the small stick with gesso in his right hand, and the innocence of his eyes, give us the image of a living person; the material quality of the colours and the famous lacquers used by Fra Galgario make it an emblem of his painting.

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Fra Galgario and Portraiture Between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

c. 1740 oil on canvas 60.5 × 54.9 cm Giovanni Morelli Collection, 1891

Milan 1698 - 1767

Giacomo Ceruti (il Pitocchetto) Portrait of Young Girl with Fan Sincere and true humanity immortalized in the portraits and moving canvases with the poor and beggars portrayed almost in life-size dimensions allowed Ceruti to earn a prominent place among the painters of reality in Lombardy.

The girl with the big sad eyes and full lips portrayed in the Carrara canvas is one of the most famous images of his painting and one of the most touching interpretations of adolescence. The figure of the girl stands in front of a simple brown background and she gives herself up to the eye of the painter with a disarming simplicity, wearing a turquoise dress and holding a large purple fan in her hand.

This unadorned way of presenting the character and the simplicity of execution are the substance of Ceruti’s realism.

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Eighteenth-Century Painting in Venice

c. 1743 oil on canvas 40 × 22.4 cm gift of Francesco Baglioni, 1900

Venice 1696 Madrid 1770

Giovan Battista Tiepolo Martyrdom of Saint John the Bishop of Bergamo

90

Tiepolo dominated eighteenth-century Venetian and European painting with his monumental altarpieces, refined paintings of mythological themes and, particularly, the impressive fresco decorations, which are distinguished by their extraordinary inventive vein and for their amazing vibrancy and clarity of colour.

According to a practice typical of seventeenth and eighteenth-century painting, Tiepolo established the general lines of the composition in sketches that were submitted to customers for preliminary approval.

These paintings also fuelled a flourishing collectors’ market, made up of amateurs who appreciated them for their fresh first idea and as a testimony of the master’s more immediate hand. The Carrara canvas is a sketch of the altarpiece made by Tiepolo for the Cathedral of Bergamo in 1743.

22

Eighteenth-Century Painting in Venice

c. 1757 - 1760 oil on canvas 61 × 49.3 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice 1702 - 1785

Pietro Longhi (Pietro Falca) The Foyer After a debut in the field of religious painting and fresco decoration, Pietro Longhi made a decisive move towards the new genre painting, which was becoming increasingly popular with collectors. This was the beginning of pictures dedicated to Venetian life observed in the streets and in palace interiors, in the pastimes of the common people, and those of the aristocracy. They were small canvases in bright colours and a refined painting technique, an outspoken chronicle of the habits of Venetian society of the time, paintings that made the artist famous. The Carrara painting depicts a recurring theme in Longhi’s work, the foyer of the Ca’ Giustinian in Venice, a popular public gambling hall open primarily during the carnival period.

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Genre Painting: Still Lifes, Landscapes and Cityscapes

1665 - 1675 oil on canvas 88.5 × 114.5 cm gift of Giovanni Marenzi, 1926

Bergamo 1617 - 1677

Evaristo Baschenis Musical I­ nstruments and Green Curtain The still life as an independent genre became established during the seventeenth century in Europe and within this context, Evaristo Baschenis is recognized as one of the great still life painters. The Bergamo artist is particularly famous for his depiction of musical instruments, so highly appreciated that he inspired a whole entourage of followers and imitators. The Carrara preserves four paintings by Baschenis, including this magnificent composition that belongs to his later works. The painting is dominated by the pyramid of stringed and bowed string instruments stacked apparently randomly on the table. An absolute silence and rigorous and secret geometric order govern this rarefied work, where the ineluctable passage of time is marked only by the dust that is settling on the objects.

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Genre Painting: Still Lifes, Landscapes and Cityscapes

c. 1726 - 1728 oil on canvas 61.7 × 99.3 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice 1697 - 1768

Canaletto (Antonio Canal) The Grand Canal from Ca’ Foscari Looking toward the Rialto Bridge Canaletto is the most famous of the Venetian veduta painters and his views of Venice contributed to consecrating the myth of the Serenissima. Not only do his paintings precisely record the city’s topography, but through careful observation of the light he was able to create an imperturbable and eternal image of eighteenth-century Venice.

In the painting preserved in the Carrara, Canaletto portrays the Grand Canal in a framing that was codified

by Luca Carlevarijs in a famous painting, but adopts a broader and more expanded construction of the scene, a result of his training and his early training as a theatrical scene painter. In the foreground on the left stands the facade of Palazzo Balbi, to the right we can recognize the Erizzo, Contarini and Mocenigo palazzos, while the Rialto Bridge can just be glimpsed in the distance.

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Genre Painting: Still Lifes, Landscapes and Cityscapes

1785 - 1790 oil on panel 19 × 15 cm Guglielmo Lochis Collection, 1866

Venice 1712 - 1793

Francesco Guardi Rio dei Mendicanti The story of Venetian veduta painting ends with Francesco Guardi, who gave in his works a palpable and evocative image of Venice, far from Canaletto’s geometry of perspective and clear light. Gradually freeing himself from the models and iconography of traditional landscape painting, Guardi, in his later years broke the forms down into colour, almost negating the architectural roots and perspectives of the genre. The Rio dei Mendicanti belongs to the final part of his career and the artist depicts the stretch of canal dominated by the church of St. Lazarus of the Beggars, built in front of the hospice of the same name. This quite minute painting, where the figures and architectures have the consistency of ghosts, is one of the most charming views of Venice at the end of the eighteenth century.

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The Sculpture Collection

Rooms

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Sculptures from the Zeri Collection

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The Fantoni Sculpture Workshop

The Accademia Carrara houses a small but valuable collection of sculptures dating from the late fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. There are two main groups to the collection and both have very different features.

The group of works by the Fantonis is representative of the work of this famous family of carvers and sculptors originally from Rovetta, in Val Seriana. In eighteenthcentury Lombardy, the Fantoni family built one of the most modern and extensive workshops of the time. It was organized and equipped to produce a quantity of disparate objects, meeting the needs of a very diverse clientele. Apart from famous masterpieces with profane subjects, such as the group with Venus, Vulcan and Cupid or Ganymede’s Love Nest, which show Fantoni’s skill as a woodcarver, the museum owns a group of preparatory terracotta works for the altar relief of the Pietà in the Cathedral of Bergamo and for other confidently and freely executed sacred works.

The second important group of sculptures arrived at the Accademia Carrara with Federico Zeri’s bequest.

An internationally renowned art historian and heir to an illustrious tradition of connoisseurs, Zeri was not only a champion in his discipline, but also a brilliant writer, a caustic polemicist, and eccentric collector. The scholar had a special collaborative and affectionate relationship with the Carrara, sealed by the decision to leave his collection of sculptures to the Museum in Bergamo. This composite and surprising collection was created without a specific project. The collection is a result of a voracious curiosity regarding works and artists worth learning more about and perhaps rediscovering, allowing for an unusual and original journey into the history of Italian and European sculpture, particularly Baroque sculpture.

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Sculptures from the Zeri Collection

1610 - 1615 marble 105 × 52.5 × 40 cm Federico Zeri Collection, 1998

Sesto Fiorentino, Florence, 1562 Rome 1629

Pietro Bernini Andromeda Pietro Bernini was one of the leading late Mannerist Roman sculptors, but he was overshadowed for a long time by the personality of his son Gian Lorenzo, sculptor, painter and architect, one of the best known artists of the Baroque era.

The statue Andromeda came into Accademia Carrara thanks to the bequest of art historian Federico Zeri, one of the proponents of this artist’s rediscovery. The daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, rulers of Ethiopia, is represented in the moment in which she is still chained to the rock, looking towards Perseus, who is about to free her from the dragon, as Ovid recounts in his Metamorphoses.

The marble comes from a fountain decoration, probably that of the garden of Cardinal Scipione Borghese on the Quirinal Hill, in the heart of Rome.

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The Fantoni Sculpture Workshop

c. 1774 - 1775 wood 435 × 470 × 70 cm gift of Ferdinanda Sottocasa, 1996

Rovetta, Bergamo, 1713 - 1798

Grazioso Fantoni Il Giovane and workshop Ganymede’s Love Nest The Fantoni were a family of carvers and sculptors who worked mainly in Lombardy from the mid-fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century. The workshop’s business was predominantly the crafting of sacred furnishings, but no less important was the secular work, as we can see by the Ganymede’s Love Nest. The work dates from the last stage of the Fantoni production, in the years when the workshop was run by Grazioso Il Giovane and his brother Francesco Donato, and celebrates the marriage between the commissioning party, Gerolamo Sottocasa, and a young woman from the Lupi family. The piece is presented like a stage setting and is structured on three levels that host statues and bas-reliefs with scenes from mythology. The sculpture with the eagle of Jupiter that grabs Ganymede soars above, to be interpreted as a celebration of marriage and its power to elevate the soul to heaven.

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The Fantoni Sculpture Workshop

1714 wood 116 × 161.5 × 43 cm Giacomo Carrara Collection, 1796

Rovetta, Bergamo, 1659 - 1734

Andrea Fantoni Vulcan, Venus and Cupid (Fable of Venus) Andrea is the most famous member of the Fantoni family and helped make the workshop, which he led for over half a century, one of the most renowned for the production of sculptures and wooden furnishings in the Lombard area.

The sculptural group composed of the figure of Vulcan who is making lightning, the eagle that brings them to Jupiter and Venus who sits and plays with Cupid, was sculpted in 1714 for Ventura Carrara and used as a decoration above the fireplace in the Carrara house in Bergamo. The tale of Venus is narrated by Ovid in Metamorphoses and by several other writers, but Andrea Fantoni provides a refined and genteel version of the story, choosing to omit the scene of intercourse between Venus and Mars that unleashed the revenge of Vulcan, husband of the goddess.

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The Nineteenth Century. The Age of the Bourgeoisie

Rooms

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Nineteenth-Century Portraiture: From Piccio to Tallone

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History Painting: Between Literature and Truth

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Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting

The nineteenth century was the century that marks the end of the artistic supremacy of Italy over other European countries. The primacy had been undermined for a long time and the extraordinary international reputation of a sculptor like Canova was not enough to preserve it, nor the fascination that Rome, as a capital of the arts, continued to exercise for a long time. The role of leading nation for culture and taste was assumed by France and particularly Paris.

Italy still played an important role in the continent’s artistic geography, divided between nostalgia for an illustrious past and the problem of building a national identity. For several centuries the figurative art history of Italy was characterized by the wealth and variety of centres, schools and artistic traditions. During the nineteenth century, the hegemonic role of Milan, modern European metropolis, came to the fore. The foundation of the Academy of Brera and the development of an innovative system of competitions and exhibitions made the city the centre of the market and contemporary art collecting. Milan became the stage for Italy’s major artistic events: the historical romanticism of Francesco Hayez, the affirmation of genre painting, landscape and portrait, the development of the naturalist and veristic trends, and finally the birth of Italian Pointillism.

With the School of Painting and the Art Gallery founded

by Count Giacomo Carrara, Bergamo carved out a unique position in the Italian scene. The uncompromising education in drawing imparted to the students by Giuseppe Diotti consolidated the Accademia Carrara as a stronghold of classicism and a high and sublime style in painting. However this did not prevent the classrooms from producing one of the most original Italian artists of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Carnovali, known as Piccio. The renovation came a few decades later, with Cesare Tallone, who invited young artists to look closer at reality, through the practice of painting from life.

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Nineteenth-Century Portraiture: From Piccio to Tallone

c. 1845 oil on canvas 135.5 × 89.5 cm gift of Antonio Pesenti, 1981

Montegrino, Varese, 1804 Cremona 1873

Piccio (Giovanni Carnovali) Portrait of Countess Anastasia Spini A student of Giuseppe Diotti at the School of Painting at the Accademia Carrara, Piccio was known among his contemporaries for his rebellious and restless temperament and his retired existence. He devoted himself, with mixed success, to historical and landscape painting, but above all, he was an outstanding portraitist.

Countess Anastasia Spini belonged to a family of minor nobility in the province, and is particularly connected to Piccio. The portrait of the gentlewoman is one of the artist’s masterpieces and one of the unforgettable images of the Italian nineteenth century. Anastasia sits comfortably on a chair covered in leather and holds a pinch of snuff between her fingers; she seems to have given up reading the prayer book on the table and looks at us with resignation and mildness that the artist portrays with disarming impudence.

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Nineteenth-Century Portraiture: From Piccio to Tallone

c. 1845 oil on canvas 131 × 95 cm gift of Beatrice Presti Tasca, 1910

Bergamo 1812 Pavia 1882

Giacomo Trécourt Portrait of ­B eatrice (Bice) Presti Tasca

106

Born into a family of modest means, Giacomo Trécourt studied at the Accademia Carrara under the leadership of Giuseppe Diotti, and in 1842 became the director of the Municipal School of Painting in Pavia.

The Portrait of Bice Presti Tasca depicts the daughter of Ottavio Tasca, a Bergamo poet and patriot, and Francesca Bossi. Beatrice was twenty years old at the time and had been married to Giovanni Presti for a few months. Giovanni Presti commissioned the work. The young woman is wearing an emerald green dress that brings out her ivory complexion and the elegant profile of the figure seems to be measured against an even more perfect oriental vase placed above the console. The painting is an image of icy beauty and sanctions Trécourt’s temporary adherence to a refined formal purism which blends the lesson of the master classicist Diotti and the influence of Francesco Coghetti, who two years earlier had done the portrait of Beatrice’s husband, also preserved at the Carrara.

26

Nineteenth-Century Portraiture: From Piccio to Tallone

c. 1847 - 1848 oil on canvas 71 × 58.5 cm gift of Luigi Trécourt, 1882

Montegrino, Varese, 1804 Cremona 1873

107

Piccio (Giovanni Carnovali) Self-portrait with Palette Piccio earned a position of solitary greatness in the history of nineteenth-century Italian art. His painting returns to the Lombard naturalism and the grace of Correggio, with the passing of the years adopting an airier and often deliberately unfinished approach. This evolution of style can be read in the many self-portraits that punctuate the entire span of his existence, becoming a sort of autobiography of the artist. In the painting from the Carrara, which dates back to the late 1840s, Piccio is depicted at half-length, with his working tools, the palette and brushes. The intense psychological study is accompanied by the gradual softening and blurring of boundaries in an increasingly expressive personal and secluded research.

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Nineteenth-Century Portraiture: From Piccio to Tallone

1889 oil on canvas 241 × 145 cm gift of Maria Gallavresi Bietti, 1946

Savona 1853 Milan 1919

Cesare Tallone Portrait of Maria Gallavresi with Her Mother An artist with a solid academic training, Tallone became one of the last great portrait painters, before this genre was replaced by photography. In 1884, he won the competition for the Painting Chair at the Carrara Academy, a post he held until 1899, starting an intensive renovation of teaching methods. The Portrait of Maria Gallavresi with her Mother is from these Bergamo years, and depicts the wife and daughter of Emilio Gallavresi, lawyer and politician born in Caravaggio, a supporter of socialist ideas.

The two women are represented full-length, life-size, in front of a wall covered with damask wallpaper. Painted from life, in the studio, the double portrait was painted with a robust, intensely expressive style.

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History Painting: Between Literature and Truth

1842 oil on canvas 121 × 151 cm gift of Giulia Frizzoni, 1932

Venice 1791 Milan 1882

Francesco Hayez Caterina Cornaro Deposed from the Throne of Cyprus Hayez was one of the greatest Romantic painters in Italy.

The reputation of the painter is entrusted to the paintings of historical subjects, often laden with patriotic meanings or alluding to the Italian political situation, but his portraits and his sensuous female figures also aroused great enthusiasm.

The Carrara canvas was commissioned by Antonio Frizzoni, a member of a Bergamo family of textile entrepreneurs.

The painting depicts the climactic episode of a story that was very popular in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Giorgio Cornaro informs his sister Caterina, Queen of Cyprus, that the Republic of Venice has decided to depose her and announces her future confinement in the castle of Asolo. The scene is constructed through a calibrated study of light and the characters’ poses and has a highly theatrical tone, typical of Hayez’s painting.

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History Painting: Between Literature and Truth

c. 1887 oil on canvas 100 × 231 cm gift of Cesare Pisoni, 1923

Ferrara 1852 Lavagna, Genoa, 1920

Gaetano Previati Paolo and Francesca Gaetano Previati, along with Giovanni Segantini and Pellizza da Volpedo, was one of the leaders of Italian Pointillism (Divisionismo) and one of the most sensitive interpreters of the themes of symbolism. The Carrara painting precedes the artist’s final conversion to the technique of colour separation or Pointillism and belongs instead to the early works of the late romantic and Scapigliatura periods. The story of Paolo and Francesca, told by Dante in the Inferno, was one of those most exploited of the nineteenth-century repertoire. Previati chooses to adopt a claustrophobic horizontal format, occupying the foreground with the figures of the two unhappy lovers lying against the side of their deathbed, both slain by the same sword. The result is a vigorous and dark image, which is distinguished by its melodramatic emphasis and exaggerated naturalism.

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Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting

1887 oil on canvas 35 × 28.5 cm gift of Arturo Toscanini, 1913

Milan 1851 - 1920

113

Vittore Grubicy de Dragon Snow in August in Schilpario Vittore Grubicy is a crucial figure in late nineteenthcentury Italian art and played a decisive role in the birth of Pointillism (Divisionismo), spreading the theories on light refraction throughout Italy and supporting artists who were experimenting with the new technique of colour division. Grubicy began painting in the mid-80s, initially taking advantage of vacations in alpine resorts.

The secluded village of Schilpario, in the Scalve valley, was the destination of many visits and the snowfall was one of the artist’s favourite themes. The Carrara painting was made in 1887 with a traditional “stesura a impasto”, thickly applied paint, and taken up again twenty years later, when he overlaid a dusting of divided colours on the original surface, with an unscientific but intuitive and emotional application of the pointillist technique.

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Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting

1889 oil on canvas 106 × 79 cm gift of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, 1897

Volpedo, Alessandria, 1868 - 1907

115

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo Memory of a Sorrow (Portrait of Santina Negri) Pellizza da Volpedo is especially known as the author of Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth State), the symbol of Italian nineteenth-century painting. Instead, Memory of a Sorrow is a synthesis of the painter’s training. It was donated by the artist to the Carrara in remembrance of the teachings received from Cesare Tallone during his two years in Bergamo between 1888 and 1890. The image of the reader was quite widespread at the time, but the meaning of the work goes beyond the choice of theme. In the tearful gaze of Santina Negri, from Volpedo, Pellizza expressed the sorrow for the death of the sister Antonietta, who died in October of 1889. The setting of the portrait comes from Tallone, while the construction of the space with planes of bright colour on the large backgrounds recalls the painting of the Macchiaioli artists.

Index of artists

Bartolomeo Veneto 46 Basaiti, Marco 47 Baschenis, Evaristo 93 Bassano, Jacopo (Jacopo da Ponte) 76 Bellini, Giovanni 20, 23 Bembo, Ambrogio 43 Bembo, Bonifacio 43 Benozzo di Lese: see Gozzoli, Benozzo Bergognone, Bernardino: see Bramantesque Master Bernini, Pietro 98 Boltraffio, Giovan Antonio 57 Bordon, Paris 77 Boselli, Antonio 51 Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi) 37 Botticini, Francesco 34 Bramantesque Master (Bernadino Bergonone?) 54 Busi, Giovanni: see Cariani Canal, Antonio: see Canaletto Canaletto (Antonio Canal) Cariani (Giovanni Busi) Carnovali, Giovanni: see Piccio Carpaccio, Vittore Ceresa, Carlo Ceruti, Giacomo (il Pitocchetto) Cicognara, Antonio Cincani, Bartolomeo: see Montagna, Bartolomeo Clouet, Jean Costa, Lorenzo

94 65, 66

24 85 89 43

64 59

Falca, Pietro: see Longhi, Pietro Fantoni, Andrea Fantoni, Grazioso il Giovane Ferrari, Defendente Filipepi, Alessandro: see Botticelli, Sandro Foppa, Vincenzo Fra Galgario (Vittore Ghislandi) Francesco di Simone da Santacroce

100 99 58

17 86, 88 50

Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi) Ghislandi, Giuseppe known as Vittore: see Fra Galgario Giovanni d’Alemagna Gozzoli, Benozzo (Benozzo di Lese) Grubicy de Dragon, Vittore Guardi, Francesco

16 32 103 95

Hayez, Francesco

110

Jacobello di Antonello: see Jacopo di Antonello Jacopo di Antonello (Jacobello di Antonello) Landi, Neroccio de’: see Neroccio de’ Landi Lenbach, Franz von Longhi, Pietro (Pietro Falca) Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni) Lotto, Lorenzo

61

21

28 91 40 67, 68

Mantegna, Andrea 18 Marinoni, Antonio 12 Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula 41 Melone, Altobello 71 Molenaer, Jan Miense 82 Montagna, Bartolomeo (Bartolomeo Cincani) 25 Moroni, Giovan Battista 73, 75

Negretti, Jacopo: see Palma il Vecchio Neroccio de’ Landi Palma il Vecchio (Jacopo Negretti) Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe Piccio (Giovanni Carnovali) Piero di Giovanni see Lorenzo Monaco Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) Pisano, Antonio: see Pisanello Pitocchetto: see Ceruti, Giacomo Previati, Gaetano Previtali, Andrea

33 72 115 104, 107

15

112 48

Raphael 38 Sanzio, Raffaello: see Raphael Salvi, Giovan Battista: see Sassoferrato Sassoferrato (Giovan Battista Salvi) Solario, Andrea Stomer, Matthias

81 56 80

Tallone, Cesare 109 Tiepolo, Giovan Battista 90 Tisi, Benvenuto: see Garofalo Titian 70 TrĂŠcourt, Giacomo 106 Vecellio, Tiziano see Titian

Accademia Carrara Visitor’s Guide (Second Edition) Published by Accademia Carrara, Bergamo With the contribution of Ressolar Texts by Paolo Plebani Second edition review Paolo Plebani Paola Rota Design by Lupo & Burtscher, Bolzano with the collaboration of: Claudia Polizzi, Nike Auer Second edition layout Matteo Ducoli Production coordination Paola Azzola Photo Credits Archivio fotografico Accademia Carrara Studio Fotografico Da Re, Bergamo Colour separation by Eurofotolit, Cernusco sul Naviglio (Milano) Printed and bound by Intergrafica S.R.L., Bergamo Printed in the month of March 2019 No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Š 2019 Accademia Carrara, Bergamo First edition, April 2015; Second revised edition, March 2019