Painters of Realism featured in Cremona exhibition

The works of Caravaggio, Leonardo, Foppa and Ceruti in Ponzone

Naturalism exploded in Italian art of the 1500s starting from Lombardy. Roberto Longhi, one of the top art critics of the 20th century, first identified the Lombard painting of the time as the root of Caravaggio’s art and the origin of a Europe-wide revolution in art.
An important exhibition at Cremona’s Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, titled Pittori della realtà. Le ragioni di una rivoluzione da Foppa e Leonardo a Caravaggio e Ceruti (English title: “Painters of Realism: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy”), highlights these Lombard roots of Naturalism that ended up spreading all over Northern Italy. The exhibition tracks them from the second half of the 15th century, when Vincenzo Foppa and Leonardo da Vinci were working in Milan, to the following century and Caravaggio’s evolution in the Eighties, up to Fra’ Galgario and Ceruti in the 1700s, in an uninterrupted line of artists enamoured of reality. This project, of great scientific significance and cultural worth, was prepared by Mina Gregori, Keith Cristiansen, and Andrea Bayer, and it was conceived for two museums.
In fact, the exhibition will remain open in Cremona until May 2, and then will move to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, from May 27 to August 15.
Michelangelo Merisi, who would become known as Caravaggio after his native town, in the dioceses of Cremona, at a very early age began to work for a pupil of Titian, Bergamo-born Simone Peterzano, and trained under the influence of Lombard-Venetian painters. Later, around 1590, he moved to Rome and then Naples and Sicily, where he brought his realistic revolution, in defiance of the artistic theories and techniques of the time.
While Longhi’s essay identified a single source for Caravaggio’s art, the exhibition underscores other roots as well, in particular the heritage left in Lombardy by the great Leonardo, who worked in Milan from 1482 to 1499. Leonardo’s naturalism, which influenced subsequent Lombard art, is evidenced by four drawings lent by the Royal Library of Windsor Castle: four studies on plants in preparation for Leda and the Swan, a picture he painted around 1510 and is now at the Uffizi in Florence. Also not to be forgotten are the Carraccis (Annibale, Agostino, and Ludovico): despite being born in Emilia, they regarded themselves as Lombard painters.
The exhibition includes over 110 works by Vincenzo Foppa, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Lorenzo Lotto, Annibale Carracci, Moretto da Brescia, Giovan Gerolamo Savoldo, Evaristo Baschenis, Romanino, Giovan Battista Moroni, Andrea Solario, Sofonisba Anguissola, Giacomo Ceruti, Giovan Antonio Boltraffio, Giuseppe Arcimboldi, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Previtali, the Campis (Giulio, Antonio, and Vincenzo), Fra’ Galgario, Fede Galizia, Simone Peterzano, Tanzio da Varallo, and others. It should be noted that some of these painters were not only realists. Arcimboldi, for instance, was a pre-surrealist, with a strong Flemish influence.
The paintings and drawings come from private collections and the world’s greatest museums: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington’s National Gallery, Paris’ Musée du Louvre, London’s British Museum and National Gallery, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Los Angeles’ J. Paul Getty Museum, Berlin’s Staatliche Museen, Windsor Castle’s Royal Library, Rome’s Museo and Galleria Borghese, Florence’s Galleria Palatina, etc.
The first section of the exhibition accommodates Leonardo’s drawings and the works of the first generation of Lombard artists who followed in the great master’s steps. The second, very rich section includes some important paintings, such as Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Man with a Felt Hat usually displayed at Ottawa’s National Gallery or The Bearing of the Cross from the Louvre.
Also the artists who worked in Lombardy in the decades immediately before, during, and immediately after Caravaggio’s short period of activity (displayed in the exhibition’s third section) contributed to this tradition, which would explode in Rome with Michelangelo Merisi, when he declared to recognize Nature as his only teacher.
The most explicit testimony of the vitality of the Lombard Naturalistic worldview in the 17th century is represented, in the last section, by Carlo Ceresa’s and Baschenis’ works, sharing the same faithfulness to the observation of reality and the same resistance to cultural fads; while the 18th century, the age of Enlightenment, is represented mainly by the paintings of Vittore Ghislandi, a.k.a. Fra' Galgario, who observed his epoch with a lucid and disenchanted gaze, free from prejudice and overeager idealizations, and Giacomo Ceruti, a.k.a. Pitocchetto, who painted a sorrowful humankind very different from the traditional depictions of the poor.

Publication Date: 2004-04-04
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