Restless renaissance and viaticum padani, from Brescia to Ferrara

In recent decades, historians have declined some historical categories in the plural. Thus the monolithic and imperious Renaissance, with a capital letter, has begun to break down into multiple renaissances, where the adjective regionalist has gained over the name the force of a new reality, more adherent to a history that has become parcelled out and fractionated into different but more concrete geographies marked by documents but also by the specificity of anthropological, aesthetic data, with a particular consistency in the local history of personalities in their own way “creative” insofar as they were able to perform places, moments, ideals, though in general traceable to a single vein connoted by an element that gave the name to the entire epoch. As much as it may have averted its use in recent decades because of the separatist impulses imprinted by the Lombard League by cultivating the mythologies of the Padus pater (and the Delta mater) and the folkloric rituals of the ampoules of ’water harvested from the Po and its tributaries, reflecting archaic thoughts translated into autarkic (but now Roman beyond all independence) politicking, the idea that there existed a Po Valley side of the arts in the full and late Renaissance resurfaced in the concomitance of two exhibitions devoted to the Brescian Renaissance and the 16th century Ferrara.

The idea of a new classical civilization inspired by antiquity cannot ignore the fact that there are chromosomal affiliations that, for example, branch off the Lombard Renaissance into Brescian, Cremonese, and Bergamascan “idioms” with respect to the Milanese language, on which nonetheless the Venetian influence also had a weight not only political or rather of style and speech. This is the theme of “dialects” versus the language of an entire human type. Similarly, the Ferrarese world asserted an influence beyond its own borders within the confines of the Bolognese world, through the Quattrocento of Ercole de’ Roberti’s “workshop” whose impulses, like the two antennae of a marvelous beetle, Antonio da Crevalcore and Lorenzo Costa picked up.

The Padana irradiation mixes its lights by proceeding northward and finding some not accidental hooks with the Lombard Renaissance; particular idioms, personal and communal, are indeed distinguished from the world of Leonardo’s influence, without denying its role (see, in thatsphere, Foppa’s parable), but taking on a “dialectal” aspect that does not equate to crude, primitive or prosaic, insofar as it is earthy and rooted, that is, capable of capturing as much of the human as the artistic medium can. Considering the developments that the same literature on Caravaggio has recorded in the last thirty years, one must consider the fact that Merisi himself emerges contaminated by forms and ideas that make him somewhat less “subversive” but still anticlassical, exposed to the frontiers of naturalism, yet bound in his training to the same Mannerism whose lesson he, indeed, breathed in the moment when still a boy he went to school at Peterzano’s, but which he then meditated on and resolved by diluting even Borromean pauperism, where the real and the natural cooperate in an idea of man outside all divisions of class or condition, in short, with a pictorial rather than ideological discourse such as twentieth-century critics havehas caged it; but even the more mature Caravaggio incorporated elements of that classicism from ancient times to the giants of the modern epoch of which he took into account while passing through Bologna on his way to and then living in Rome.

In Cose bresciane Roberto Longhi wrote in 1929 that that school was “perhaps the richest in intelligence and almost secretive research boasting in northern Italy at that time. Its incontestable relations, and its equally evident distinction from contemporary Venetian painting, and its fidelity to earlier traditions, and its very rapid perceptions of the new, its refractions elsewhere in not too distant lands, the flowing sometimes in its veins of the fluid of the fluid that Lotto was going to spread in Italy according to a topography as capricious as its forms, are as many delightful questions that not exactly unraveled so far.” Prominent names were those whose works still punctuate the cultured retrospective held in the Brescia Museo di Santa Giulia until Feb. 16 (Silvana catalog) curated by Roberta D’Adda, Filippo Piazza and Enrico Valseriati.

Still in 1935, the curator of the exhibition devoted to Painting in Brescia between the 17th and 18th centuries, Emma Calabi-an art historian remembered in 2023 for having paid the consequences of the Racial Laws that forced her to flee to Brazil, interrupting a promising career- began her introductory essay to the catalog by evoking “the great Brescian painting tradition,” the one “represented by Savoldo, Romanino and, with more nostrano accent, the absorbed Moretto!” which had been “kept alive during the 1500s through the work of Lattanzio Gambara, Luca Mombello, Richino, and Agostino Galeazzi, and, before giving way to the multiform Mannerism of the early 17th century, still had illuminated by a pale light of reflection the best things of Pietro Marone, Girolamo Rossi and Pier Maria Bagnadore.” The scholar noted that the historical juncture means that these last painters who lived at the turn of the two centuries, although they belonged to a period that was now over, “already announced the later seventeenth-century orientation.” This also happened without them being absolute peaks; rather, the historian pointed out, “they were reduced to a tired repetition of attitudes and a few rare, fine chromatic annotations.”

Strangely enough, in their multifaceted eclecticism, the Brescians of the first half of the 17th century, locked in their small and quiet provincial world, seemed not to notice what Caravaggio’s revolution was bringing to the major Italian centers. Perhaps, Calabi noted, only Ceruti - rediscovered precisely in the first half of the twentieth century - was able to renew a century later and “with modern feeling, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro plasticity.” It was, after all, the Longinian and Testorian terminus ad quem.

What matures in Brescia with Savoldo, and then with Romanino and Moretto-the most represented in the current exhibition-is a “restless renaissance.” The civil relationship with the Venetians was almost like a protectorate, but also one of some creative and social subjugation: the nearly half-century that elapsed after the Sack of Gaston de Foix’s troops in 1512 was in fact a time of economic crisis and political dependence, aggravated two years later by the plague, with the shadow of Venice, which in order to encourage reconstruction-a Marshall Plan of the time- eased the tax burden so that part of the revenue was used to restore monuments and churches it had partly helped demolish with the “esplanade” that lasted from 1516 to 1517 with the aim of making the French army’s advance arduous. But this also meant, after the end of the war, an incentive for artistic commissions that fostered the emergence of new talent. These included precisely the three “Caravaggesque predecessors” - Savoldo, Romanino and Moretto.

The Renaissance celebrated here today was thus one moved by the desire to find a “civil concord.” Surrounded as we are daily by images of wartime destruction that leave standing only ruins, it should not be difficult for us to understand the commitment it took on the part of everyone, including artists, to restore a city in pieces so that it would also be a symbol of unity through a political will to redeem itself from the same moral and material collapse. The altarpieces or the Stendardo delle sante croci by Moretto in 1520, the year of Raphael’s death, although born in the religious sphere were also a social and political stimulus, as had already been the case with Foppa’s Stendardo di Orzinuovi, whose reason was that of a civil ex voto to implore divine protection for the people of Brescia from the plague.

The Venetians’ “Esplanade,” which reduced Brescia to immense ruin by sacrificing churches and monasteries, was not felt as an act of defense against the common French enemy but as an intolerable vulnus by the population, which still asserted Venice’s dominant position. And if earlier Brescia and Ferrara lived culturally under the influence of the two major cultural centers of the North, namely Venice and Milan, after the conflict the commissions decided by Francesco Sforza actually favored some major presences in Bergamo and Brescia - Leonardism and Bramantism were always considered as a rejection of the high tradition, the one that Testori called of the “golden men” and that before him Longhi always disliked, to the point of pushing Foppa to work in the Province although he had left important signs in Milan such as the Portinari Chapel in Sant’Eustorgio.

Social revival was to follow the end of wartime activities, but was delayed by the plague. Slowly figures such as the saint Angela Merici, or the agronomist Agostino Gallo, who renewed techniques and culture by rediscovering the knowledge of the ancients and the value of living in harmony with nature, imposed themselves on the collective imagination. This new sentiment, associated with the poetic and musical, can be sensed in a work by Savoldo, the Shepherd with Flute of 1525, where the Arcadian-pastoral sense of the encounter between naturalism and language, also contemplates the dialectal dimension of the link with the territory, which in Brescia reached its climax in the work of Giacomo Ceruti that Testori revives in the essay Language and Dialect in the Brescian Tradition (1966). Emerging in those pages is a dialectic between center and periphery of high cultural and political tenor where the language of the people contrasts with the “superb Renaissance mythologies” and recovers the cornerstones of the Brescian Renaissance. As it happens, the “’cagnaroso’ Romanino” speaks a “lopsided, ’sbotasata’ and ’sgalvagnata’ language” (which pendants with the “strangosciate” mothers of Paracca in Varallo); and that: “the dialect, the great Brescian ’idiom’ gave, with Romanino, a confused, disordered, but mighty jolt, like a guttural verse rising from the deepest inwardness of the earth; to such an extent that they seemed to retrogress from the position already of autonomous language to which Foppa had led them, to that, guttural and borborigmic, clogging and gigantic, of the anonymous valley-speakers; or of the prehistoric Camuni taken and read for signs of who knows what witch-like barbarism.”

Extreme language, then, that of the Brescians, to which Testori tries to conform in writing style, as if even that judgment came out of his pen as a gastric reflux, or as a wheeze that processes history. A junction that connects and unties together, Foppa’s “witchy barbarism” with Ceruti’s epic rags on which, at the end of his life, Testori had, however, had some second thoughts, particularly about his religious painting, since the stigma that Longhi had imprinted on Pitocchetto seemed to be lost in an inauthentic formality. “Everything was nothing but ’portrait,’ and, because of the breadth and total humanity of gaze and reflection, ’portrait’ of the whole world,” Testori writes, “... not the ’pitocco’ as a type; but that poor devil, that wretch, that ’strapennato.’” It was a matter of humanity and not, precisely, of concepts. The apotheosis of feriality, after Caravaggio.

Years ago, in 2019 if I remember correctly, an exhibition dedicated to animals was held in the Tosio Martinengo Museum, and in this singular Brescian zoo the absence of a canvas that remains unique and memorable of its kind and that today we can finally see in Santa Giulia stood out like an intolerable void: I speak of Christ in the deseto with animals, which according to the imaginative frequenter of ancient cultures Robert Eisler - whose magmatic 1953 essay Man in to Wolf, studying the anthropological difference between frugivorous man and carnivorous man, was also published in Italian in 2011(Man in to Wolf, Medusa, 2011) - , took inspiration from the Gospel of Mark 1:13. It is a painting from Moretto’s early period, immediately following the Sacco, and has been in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1911; according to scholars, the small picture was part of a larger painting when Moretto’s painting was still under Venetian influence. An iconographic unicum where Christ seems absorbed in listening to the beasts, almost as if he were talking to them on a level of inwardness of mind, an image far from being subject to Satan’s temptations. It would also be necessary to clarify who was behind this “reduction” of the canvas, in order to understand to what extent the thematic and stylistic impression matches theclassical element that is delineated in a new feeling of nature, charged with lyrical values in its reference to music, like a symphony composed with the voices of animals in the pictorial reflection (an area enhanced in the exhibition by Savoldo’s Young Man with Flute and Shepherd, to Moretto’s splendid Priest Contemplating the Prophet David , who instead of theharp exhibits an arm lyre (among the instruments on display are the Charles IX Violin with traces of the decoration proving it belonged to the King of France, and a pentagonal spinet, still with the keyboard in its original extension). Moretto’s desert, however, is almost silent, like a silent film, as if to allude to Christ’s inner dialogue with the simple souls that populate the landscape making it an emblem of the beginning, which if it may also recall the myth of Orpheus, conversely suggests a remembrance of Paradise Lost.

Past the time of Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti, it is as when in a marvelous history, a period of extraordinary intensity and creativity is succeeded by a crisis that aspires, first and foremost, to a new beginning. What confronts Ferrara with the difficult challenge of high-level replacement. A stinging burden that needed to be measured against (so wished Alfonso I succeeding his father Hercules), not least because what is to fill the void was bred in that before and has at the same time gathered stimuli from a variety of local nuances.

Along this “Padana” line already ran the exhibition two years ago at Palazzo dei Diamanti Rinascimento in Ferrara articulated on Ercole de’ Roberti and Lorenzo Costa, the sequel to which is now this one dedicated to the 16th century by Mazzolino, Ortolano, Garofalo and Dosso, also at the same venue, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli until February 16 (Skira catalog). Even then, Sgarbi struck a chord about the mutual exchanges of Ferrara artists with the Bolognese context for an osmosis that pushed the Po Valleyethos to the definition of “another” Renaissance and led the critic to hope for a forthcoming exhibition on the Bolognese one. The question embraces the discourse of cultural macro-areas, modulating it on the pictorial work of the four musketeers and coagulating around Raphael (propitious was, for all, the arrival in Bologna in 1516 of theEcstasy of Saint Cecilia) and Titian (with the Averoldi Polyptych in 1522 in Brescia), contacts that in Ferrara found the connection between Brescia and Cremona, and with Pavia, or rather in Modena that with Milan. Po Valley language that Sgarbi revives and that finds in Dosso Dossi, the most gifted and cultured of the quartet, the painter Alfonso favored, the trait-d’union between Raphael and Titian.

And it was precisely under the reign of Alfonso I d’Este that this new sense of Ferrarese art matured, with the classical sources inspiring perhaps Dosso’s most celebrated painting, also a pictorial unicum, that of Jupiter the Painter of Butterflies, Mercury and Virtue executed between 1523 and 1524. By becoming the patron of a new generation of artists, the duke emerges as a modern ruler who also exercises power through the management of images. This is the moment where, between Bologna and Ferrara, a culture is developed, whose tones if also those of a “humble renaissance” do not fail, however, to enhance the whole Ferrara and Po Valley tradition, with a map that from the “periphery” affirms the values dear to Roberto Longhi in open polemic with Florentine primacy, that is, also a search free from the bonds of Venetian viaticum.

In the same period, a human type aspiring to a different “autonomy” also emerged in Brescia and symbolized it in the image of Fortunato Martinengo, scion of one of the most influential aristocratic families in the sixteenth century; the emblematic nature that his effigy takes on in Moretto’s portrait-who, however, was not identified with Martinengo until mid of the last century after numerous attempts and recognitions with other personages - concerns first of all the pose of the arm propping up the head with the face absorbed in deep thoughts typical of the melancholic and the refinement of the clothing, which has also led to evoking pictorial links with Lotto; an elegance that corresponds well to Fortunato’s inclination for “letters.” Indeed, he did not follow either an ecclesiastical or military career, nor did he put much effort into the family estates: his real interest lay in culture in the broadest sense, from literary to music, from the visual arts to philosophy and works of the spirit; he was nevertheless a leading figure in the confrontation at the time very harsh between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation although, dying prematurely, he could not see the end of the Council of Trent and its immediate effects.

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