Indepth Arts News:
"Giovanni Battista Moroni: Renaissance Portraitist"
2000-02-26 until 2000-05-28
Kimbell Art Museum
Fort Worth, TX,
USA United States of America
The Kimbell Art Museum is organizing a series of small, focused
exhibitions on artists or themes that have not previously been treated in
depth in the United States. The first of these exhibitions is devoted to the
16th-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (c. 1523–1579).
While the 16th-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (c.
1523–1579) has been the subject of retrospectives in Italy, and was
celebrated in the 400th anniversary exhibition of 1978 at the National
Gallery, London (mostly drawn from London's own extensive holdings),
there has been no equivalent representation of his achievement in this
country.
In this focused exhibition, the Kimbell Art Museum brings together 10 of
Moroni's finest and most innovative works from throughout his career,
ranging from his earliest portraits showing the influence of northern
realism, to his later works reflecting the climate of reform promulgated at
the Council of Trent, where the Catholic Counter-Reformation was set in
motion. The portraits in Giovanni Battista Moroni: Renaissance
Portraitist have been loaned from museums in the United States and
Canada, a private collection in Great Britain, and from the collection of
Count Moroni in Bergamo, Italy.
Francesco Maria Tassi, in his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects of Bergamo (1793), reported that whenever Venetian
noblemen were appointed as provincial governors in Bergamo, Titian
recommended that they have their portrait painted there by Moroni—if
they desired a “true and natural likeness.” One of the most outstanding
portrait painters of the 16th century, Moroni is perhaps the first painter
in the Italian Renaissance to concentrate his activity primarily as a
portraitist.
Born in the small town of Albino, northeast of Bergamo in the foothills
of the Alps, Moroni was trained in the workshop of Alessandro
Bonvicino, called Moretto (c. 1498–1554), in nearby Brescia. As a young
man, Moroni was employed in Trent during the opening sessions of the
Church Council; he painted the nephews of Cardinal Cristoforo
Madruzzo, whose own portrait was painted by Titian and who played a
prominent role as a mediator between the papacy and the Holy Roman
Empire. The exhibition includes Moroni's impressive full-length Portrait
of Gian Lodovico Madruzzo (c. 1551–52, The Art Institute of
Chicago)—future cardinal and successor to his uncle as prince-bishop of
Trent—a strikingly naturalistic work that arguably owes more to the
example of German portraits of members of the Habsburg court than to
Italian models. By the early 1550s, Moroni was primarily active in the region of
Bergamo, painting portraits of the local aristocracy and professional
classes, along with sacred commissions and devotional paintings such as
Portrait of a Man before the Virgin and Child (c. 1557–60, National
Gallery of Art, Washington). This image of intimate and devout religious
experience—with the Virgin and Child appearing to the donor as in a
vision—reflects the spirit of reform that Moroni would have heard
deliberated in Trent.
Rather than working for the imperial court or seeking his fortune in
Venice or Milan, Moroni established himself as the leading painter in
Bergamo, an outpost of the Venetian Republic strategically located near
Milan and the Germanic territories to the north. The cultivated circle of
patrons that sat for Moroni included nobles with Spanish and imperial
sympathies. Among his most celebrated masterpieces is the Portrait of
Gian Gerolamo Grumelli, popularly known as The Cavaliere
(Knight) in Pink (1560, Collezione Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo), which is
illustrated on the cover of this magazine. Grumelli, who was named a
Knight of the Golden Spur at age 10, declares his cultural allegiance with
the display of a Spanish motto and a magnificent costume of
silver-embroidered, coral-pink silk. Also included in the exhibition is the
Portrait of Isotta Brembati (Collezione Palazzo Moroni), a
Bergamasque noblewoman and poet who became Grumelli's second wife
in 1561. Moroni painted this portrait some years earlier, about 1552–53,
employing the seated full-length format—an uncommon tribute for a
woman, and particularly for a nonroyal subject, until it was taken up by
Rubens and Van Dyck in the 17th century. ther portraits featured in the exhibition indicate the range of Moroni's
sitters, which, as well as the nobility, included scholars and writers, jurists
and clergymen, military men and civil servants. Datable soon after the
portrait of Grumelli is the three-quarter-length Portrait of Mario
Benvenuti (c. 1560–63, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art,
Sarasota), a professed “Dux” or military leader under Charles
V—possibly a nostalgic record of Benvenuti's youthful exploits. Also
from this period is Canon Bartolomeo Bonghi (The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York), former rector at the University of Pavia,
who Moroni portrays with characteristic vividness and immediacy.
Shortly after these commanding portraits were painted, Moroni returned
to his native Albino for reasons that are not entirely clear but that
doubtless involved changes in the political fortunes of his patrons. There
he painted altarpieces for country parishes and portraits of members of
the local aristocracy as well as more modest patrons—all depicted with a
penetrating and candid eye and with increasingly muted colors and
shadowy backgrounds. Although many of Moroni's sitters have not been
identified, their personalities are vividly conveyed by the artist's rendering
of nuances of facial expression and physical appearance. Several portraits from Moroni's late period will be on view, including one
of Moroni's most famous works, Portrait of a Cleric (c. 1570, National
Gallery of Art, Washington), which was long known as “Titian's
Schoolmaster.” Formerly assigned to the Venetian artist and only
restored to Moroni in the mid-18th century, this canvas was sketched in
1622 by the great portraitist Anthony van Dyck in the Borghese
collection in Rome. The masterful pose of the sitter, who vigorously turns
toward the viewer as if he had been interrupted in the course of his
reading, is a typically Moronian innovation. The exceptional realism of
the hands and face and the subtle tonal effects that define the sitter in
space have been seen as anticipating the work of Caravaggio and
Velázquez. Also included from Moroni's later period is the Portrait of a
Young Man (c. 1570–75, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Dressed
in the sober black costume fashionable during these years, the thoughts
of this unidentified man of letters seem to be directed inward, and in
relation to his books, rather than toward the spectator. The portrait,
painted with fine tonal modulation, is representative of the austerity and
increased spiritual outlook expressed in Moroni's late works.
The Kimbell Art Museum is the only venue for this exhibition. A fully
illustrated catalogue, with entries by Peter Humfrey and essays by
Humfrey, Mina Gregori, Creighton Gilbert, Jane Bridgeman, and Nancy
Edwards, will be published by the Kimbell Art Museum in conjunction
with the exhibition.
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