2023-12-26 16:26:11
He looks straight ahead. Direct, but still a little surprised by his courage. The nose is slightly red, the mouth a little – the tension? – warped. The slight asymmetry of the green eyes makes his look excitingly lively.
Dark brown curls flow halfway out from under his tight-fitting black cap. A black jacket closes up to the neck, with only the tip of a collarless shirt visible. Behind him it is monochrome dark green, on the left a black wall limits the image section like a stripe.
This could be the photograph of a nameless young man today, perhaps 20 years old, who faces the world but doesn’t yet know where he belongs. But it is a wooden tablet that is more than 500 years old. Lorenzo Lotto painted it around 1509/10. They borrowed the Uffizi from Florence to Munich, where the small, precious square opens in the Old Pinacoteca the exhibition “Venezia 500 – The gentle revolution of Venetian painting”. This opening image is well chosen, as is the title. This Old Masters show comes at exactly the right time.
Portrait of a young man by Lorenzo Lotto (around 1480 to 1556)
Those: Photographic Cabinet of the Uffizi Galleries / Roberto Palermo
Because in its quiet inwardness it creates a point of calm for today’s viewer who is disturbed by the dark current events. Because she very gently and with a skilful thematic overview lays out her theses about the artificial turning point in the lagoon metropolis of Venice from the late Renaissance to the early Baroque. Because it captures the zeitgeist of a long-gone era both analytically and powerfully and makes it clear to those who come after us through its visual legacy.
And because we can definitely identify with escapism, the longing for Arcadia in the face of historical warlike events and waves of plague. Ultimately, the exhibition – part of a large-scale, scientific inventory of the Italian treasure trove of images in the State Painting Collection in Munich – can proudly show, even as a popular interim result, surprisingly conclusive attributions and brilliant restorations. So – museum mission brilliantly fulfilled.
also read
But this long-vanished Venice, which today is more or less searched for by countless tourists in the still impressively atmospheric “beaux restes”, not only resonates wonderfully and for a long time. It once again unfolds its magic through the art-historical unifying view of conflicting painter temperaments who were born and trained here, returned or only stayed for a while. And which created an independent school that was obviously indispensably strong-willed for Venetians.
At this stylistic intersection in 1500, the apparently classic work of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione overlaps with that of the much longer-lived greats Tintoretto and Titian, who seem more revolutionary to us today, in the thousand-year-old, often idiosyncratic art city and city of arts.
What also makes this show special: It focuses on portraits and landscapes, both visual motifs that the Venetians significantly developed thanks to their active trade contacts and the representatives of the Nordic, i.e. Flemish, school who were also included here. So we see no palazzi and piazzas, few people, zero boat traffic on the Grand Canal; At most there are architectural echoes in the hinterland of the Terraferma, something like the characteristic house chimneys.
Giovanni Bellini’s Aria with Child between John the Baptist and a Saint (around 1505)
Those: Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia/courtesy of the Ministerio della Cultura
Just as the beginning of the Cinquecento ushered in an escapist rural exodus, at least a preoccupation with bucolic poetry from both antiquity and modern times. The rich families, with their estates, gardens and agricultural fields, developed the culture of the Villeggiatura, which was naturally influenced by humanism.
Shepherds in Arcadia, at least that’s what the young citizens of Venice, who were conscious of their power and taking on their representative aristocratic tasks, wanted to be, at least for a few hours of reading or discussion in Salotti, Ridotti or academies. After the fashion for trousers, they frivolously called themselves “compagnie delle calze”, tights companies.
And the painters – the market idea was and has always been very strong in Venice – met these needs in various ways. Whether in the pictures of the belle donne, which are enigmatically resistant to interpretation and even more resistant to attribution, mostly anonymous, often ideally composed portraits of women as pleasing objects of enjoyment – rarely also wedding pictures or real portraits.
Fascinating snapshot
Also in the similar type of lyrical youth, developed especially by Giorgione’s circle. There is always an eroticism that can be detected in the diverse symbolism of props and postures, which should stimulate rather than excite both sexes. Nowhere else has the art of subtle seduction been mastered as confidently and unobtrusively as in Venice, which plays with its mysteries in the tangle of alleys and canals.
The men initially wear simple clothes like Lotto’s youth, the strict dress codes of the cramped metropolis built on the water required this, as evident in the dance of portraits, as more and more colorful individuality breaks through, the facial expressions become more immediate, almost like one that is still fascinating to this day A snapshot has an effect, accessories become richer and more idiosyncratic.
Especially in Giorgione’s case, a double portrait of the (presumably) polymath Trifone Gabriele and his noble student Giovanni Borgherini, which was previously hanging in the Munich residence, can be conclusively attributed through research and technical investigations. In any case, the high-quality painting shows an older, bald man with a fur collar and a brown-haired youth with an effectively draped scarf in a sophisticated posture. During these years (until his early death from the plague in 1510), the gaze turned over the shoulder towards the viewer was also a special Giorgione manner that was readily adopted by others.
also read
Another decryption crime from the depot was also solved. A three-generation male portrait of the Maggi family, now intended for the Tintoretto workshop, reveals that the child, conceived out of wedlock by the mother in the absence of the father as a merchant, was successfully hereditarily legitimized by him – also through this tablet; The grandfather looks on benevolently and confirms the dynastic act in writing.
It’s nothing new that old pictures tend to have hidden messages – sometimes it was just a clever game. At this turning point, which is also economically and politically crucial, even the obligatory religious commissions are often used, be it by the founders, commissioners or executors, to indulge the spirit of the times.
Titian’s Young Woman at the Toilet (around 1515)
Quelle: bpk / RMN – Grand Palais / Thierry Le Mage
Crucifixions or Madonnas by Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Previtali or Bartolomeo Veneto will prove to be a pretext to implement new perspective knowledge for the background, to demonstrate flora and fauna, and to explore the foothills of the Southern Alps and their fortified towns through curious drawings. In two panels by Giovanni Bellini showing Saint Jerome in the desert like Cima da Conegliano, the pastoral setting seems far more important than the religious decorations.
Or it is left out entirely, especially in prints, the homage to the pure landscape is widespread, now with a more pagan connotation with nymphs, naked gods, celebrants, musicians. Apollo’s muses bathe there and simply leave their clothes behind. And hopping bunnies play around the saints.
Above all, the rich work of Giulio and his presumably German adopted son Domenico Campagnola in this field is honored here. And on the unreachable horizon stands Giorgione’s “Tempesta” in its gloriously majestic enigma, which of course cannot be borrowed from Venice.
The sky, the waves, the water
The apparent thematic limitation becomes a virtue for the Munich exhibition. Because their theses are easily crystallized and yet are exhaustive in a course of 85 artifacts, with important ones supplementing the impressive local holdings with loans from Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Venice, Florence, Rome, Madrid, Budapest, London, New York and Washington can be completed. A few statues, a map of the lagoon city so that the actors can be tracked down, and three sound installations provide an atmospheric, discreet addition to this series of images, once again curated by collection director Andreas Schumacher.
And in the special light of these pictures, which often dissolves into silvery-pink sfumato, Venice, its sky, the waves and the water of the canals and the lagoon are present in the most atmospheric way. Invisible, but present – as befits the Serenissima.
Venezia 500. The gentle revolution of Venetian painting. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, until February 24, 2024. Catalog 39.90 euros
#Venetian #Art #beautiful #Serenissima