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Dec.19 - Dec.26, 2004 |
Painters of Realism featured in Cremona exhibition
The works of Caravaggio, Leonardo, Foppa and Ceruti in Ponzone
Originally Published: 2004-04-04
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.
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