An important painting by Caroto never exhibited goes on display in Verona

There will also be an important never before on public display at the major exhibition on Giovan Francesco Caroto (Verona, c. 1480 - 1555) to be held at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona from May 13 to October 2, 2022. This will be the first exhibition devoted entirely to the artist and will feature more than 100 works from notable Italian and international collections. A specially supported restoration and diagnostic analysis campaign is also planned, with the aim of making the exhibition also an opportunity to deepen knowledge of the painter’s technical operation and the interventions that affected his creations over time.

The work the public is familiar with for the first time was unveiled this morning, and from today, March 3, until the opening date of the exhibition, it will be on public preview at the Castelvecchio Museum. It is the Madonna of the Butterfly, from a private collection. It will be exhibited together with Veritas filia Temporis, a gift of the Arvedi family to the collections of the Civic Museums of Verona. The two paintings remain on display from today in the Painting Gallery of the Castelvecchio Museum, until they are transferred to the Palazzo della Gran Guardia, for the public opening of the exhibition set for May 13.

The Madonna of the Butterfly is an early work, a painting executed in oil on panel, dating to the years 1510-1515 and to the stylistic climate of the experience Giovan Francesco Caroto had at Mantegna’s side and in contact with the culture of Mantua and Leonardo. We do not know its original destination: the work is known only from the early 20th century, when it was in the Viennese collection of Baron Heinrich von Tucher. After the owner’s death it wandered for a long time among private collections, only to reappear in New York and finally, in the 1990s, return again to Italy, in the Martello collection in Fiesole. Its travails, however, were not over: transferred back to the United States, it seemed lost forever. In the research carried out for the exhibition, it was finally traced to a private collector who kindly accepted the proposal to present it to the Museo di Castelvecchio in advance of the exhibition in the Gran Guardia, starting March 4, 2022, and then display it at the exhibition.

The painting that accompanies the Madonna of the Butterfly, or Veritas filia Temporis, came to the Museum’s Pinacoteca in 2019 as a gift from the Arvedi family: it is a large octagonal canvas that originally decorated the vault of the private study of Veronese gentleman and intellectual Giulio Della Torre. The work is one of the masterpieces of the artist’s maturity and can be dated to the early 1630s. With this important donation, the Arvedi family has symbolically assumed the role of spokesperson for the citizens who have supported the Civic Museums by actively participating, over the past four years, in the critical acquisitions and definition of the scientific project of the exhibition scheduled at the Gran Guardia from May 13 to October 2, 2022. Veritas filia Temporis will be one of the focal points of the itinerary: a section of the exhibition is intended precisely to ideally reconstruct the Della Torre studiolo, along with other paintings, drawings, Roman medals and coins, ancient marbles and modern bronzes, books and manuscripts.

During the exhibition period, the two works will be subjected to scientific investigations for the comparison of the preparatory underglaze drawing used by the painter in one and the other version, in order to verify differences and common elements in the execution technique and the methods of reproduction of models adopted in the artist’s workshop. The exhibition is promoted by the City of Verona, through the Musei Civici - Museo di Castelvecchio with Palazzo Ducale di Mantova as scientific partner, and is co-produced by Civita Mostre e Musei. The catalog is published by Silvana Editoriale.

An important painting by Caroto never exhibited goes on display in Verona

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