A major exhibition on Giovan Francesco Caroto to be held in Verona in 2022

A major exhibition dedicated to a great master of Veronese painting, Giovan Francesco Caroto (Verona, c. 1480 - 1555), will be held in 2022, from May 12 to October 2: the review, curated by Gianni Peretti (Art Historian), Edoardo Rossetti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan; Scuola Universitaria Professionale Svizzera Italiana - SUPSI, Lugano) and Francesca Rossi (Director of the Musei Civici di Verona), will be held right in Verona, in the Palazzo della Gran Guardia, and will have the goal of raising awareness of the vicissitudes of a great protagonist of 16th-century Veronese art and the facets of the artistic and cultural scene of his time, a golden season for the city’s society and for the development of the arts and archaeological and natural science culture in the area.

On display, alongside external loans from Italian and foreign public and private collections, are works from the collections of the Museo di Castelvecchio, the Museo degli Affreschi “Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle,” the Museo Archeologico al Teatro Romano, and the Museo di Storia Naturale. The scientific project is ideally connected to two similar events promoted by the Civic Art Museums in recent years: Mantegna and the Arts in Verona 1450-1500 (2006-2007) and Paolo Veronese. The Illusion of Reality (July-October 2014), two major events both dedicated to 16th-century Veronese painting. The project is supported by a network of interinstitutional relationships and a scientific committee of experts composed of Antonella Arzone (Curator Art Museum Collections and Monuments, Numismatic Cabinet - Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona), Margherita Bolla (Study, teaching and research in the field of archaeology and for the layout and enhancement of museums, monuments and archaeological areas of Roman Verona - Musei Civici di Verona), Maria Teresa Franco Fiorio (Art historian, Ente Raccolta Vinciana, Milan), Stefano L’Occaso (Director of Palazzo Ducale, Mantua), Paolo Plebani (Curator - Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), Gianni Peretti (Art historian), Edoardo Rossetti (University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan; Scuola Universitaria Professionale Svizzera Italiana - SUPSI, Lugano), Francesca Rossi (Director of the Civic Museums of Verona), Alessandra Zamperini (University of Verona).

The Civic Museums of Verona, united in an integrated museum system since 2018, intend with this exhibition to offer themselves as centers devoted to research, witnesses and interpreters of themes of the city’s history, culture and society documented by the very rich heritage of their archaeological, naturalistic and artistic civic collections. In addition, to increase the public’s expectation and interest in the major exhibition on the artist, the extensive monograph Caroto has been published by Silvana Editoriale. Giovan Francesco Caroto (c. 1480 - 1555) edited by Francesca Rossi, Gianni Peretti and Edoardo Rossetti. The volume was presented at the Gran Guardia the day before yesterday, in the presence of the Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Verona, Francesca Briani, the Director of the Civic Museums of Verona, Francesca Rossi, coauthor of the volume, together with Maria Teresa Franco Fiorio, author in 1971 of the first monograph on the artist, which is still an authoritative point of reference for studies.

The exhibition will take the public back to the Verona of the first half of the 16th century, when the city was famous for the presence of artists of great quality, especially in the fields of painting and miniature, ready to keep up to date with the latest innovations in Venetian or central Italian culture: Girolamo Dai Libri, Francesco Morone, Paolo Morando known as Cavazzola, Francesco Torbido known as il Moro, Nicola Giolfino, and many others. In the field of architecture, too, there is a rapid linguistic adaptation on the most modern formulas thanks to personalities such as Gian Maria Falconetto and Michele Sanmicheli. Among all these figures, Giovan Francesco Caroto established himself with authority and a rich pictorial production. His paintings are now at major museums (e.g., Paris, Musée du Louvre; Florence, Uffizi Galleries; Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia). His most emblematic and popular work, the Portrait of a Young Man with Drawing from the Castelvecchio Museum, is known as a town icon and will be the guiding image of the exhibition. An intelligent, inquisitive and witty man, bound by friendly relations with important city intellectuals such as Girolamo Fracastoro and Giulio Della Torre, Caroto was also an apothecary, owning a store in Piazza delle Erbe and thus linked to the milieu of the naturalists of the time.

Caroto’s artistic profile is outlined in a dense and passionate biography by Giorgio Vasari, who reports on an early education in the field of letters, training as a painter under the teachings of Liberale da Verona and Andrea Mantegna, and a successful itinerant career conducted between Mantua, at the court of the Gonzaga family; Milan, in the service of Antonio Maria Visconti; and Casale Monferrato, at the court of Marquis Bonifacio Paleologo. On this path, according to Vasari, the artist studied and reinterpreted Flemish and Nordic oil painting with great talent, specializing in the genres of portrait and landscape painting. In his mature period, upon returning from the court of Casale Monferrato, from the 1930s the painter adheres to the manner of Raphael and Michelangelo. Caroto practiced painting, miniature, naturalistic drawing, medallistics, and statuary with ease, and in secular painting, but especially in devotional painting, public and private (altarpieces, versions of the Madonna and Child with and without landscape), he demonstrated particular excellence in the execution of figures of minute size, and established himself as an indispensable point of reference in landscape painting for a wide generation of Veronese artists including Domenico Brusasorci and Paolo Caliari known as il Veronese.

The exhibition will be divided into nine sections where more than 100 works will be on display. The first, Giovan Francesco Caroto, between Verona and Mantua, in the shadow of Mantegna, will be dedicated to Caroto’s early period, where works from the artist’s beginnings will be presented in comparison with works by Liberale da Verona, Andrea Mantegna, including the Pala Trivulzio from the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Madonna delle quarries from the Uffizi Galleries and the Resurrection from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and other artists active in the city of the Gonzaga, from the young Correggio to the Veronese Domenico Morone and Francesco Bonsignori. The second, Giovan Francesco between Milan and Casale Monferrato, will focus on the Milanese and Casale Monferrato periods, with comparisons of paintings by Caroto and some of his colleagues active in Leonardo’s Milan-Bernardino Luini, Bartolomeo Suardi known as Bramantino, Giovanni Agostino da Lodi. The third, Giovanni Caroto pittore, is devoted to the artistic production of Giovanni Caroto, younger brother of Giovan Francesco, remembered by Vasari as a draughtsman of the antiquities of Verona, published in Torello Saraina’s treatise De origine et amplitudine vitatis Veronae (1540). Giovanni Caroto also made portraits, altarpieces, and wall paintings for churches in Verona, especially Santa Maria in Organo. Again, the fourth section, Giovan Francesco e l’arte del ritratto (Giovan Francesco and the Art of Portraiture), aims to bring together the painter’s portraits and compare them with some of the evidence of other artists in the context, while the fifth, Intorno al Fanciullo ridente con disegno (Around the Laughing Boy with Drawing), is closely related to the previous one, and aims to explore the iconographic relations of the famous Portrait of a Child with Drawing from the Museum of Castelvecchio, from ancient figurative sources in examples of Roman statuary, Renaissance sculptural production, and pictorial and graphic works on the theme of laughter and the representation of the child theme.

Continuing on, one will encounter the section Verona, the years of maturity: this will be a journey through the works of the artist’s maturity, in the genres he practiced, religious painting, secular painting, and “small-figure” painting, for which he was particularly appreciated by his contemporaries. The painter, who was particularly esteemed by the powerful bishop Gian Matteo Giberti, was active with numerous ecclesiastical assignments and reached a peak of success with the creation, in 1535, of the altarpiece for the high altar of the church of San Giorgio in Braida depicting St. George and the princess, now in the parish church of Marega di Bevilacqua. At this stage the artist was in all likelihood assisted by the workshop and his brother Giovanni, also a talented painter, known to have been among the first masters of Paolo Veronese. The seventh section, The Apothecary’s Shop and the Calzolari Museum, will recreate the environments of the apothecary’s shop and the Calzolari Museum, known as one of the oldest nature museums in the world, thanks to modern technology. The eighth and penultimate section, I Caroto and the Della Torre family, presents the widely documented contacts between the Della Torre family and the Caroto family. Indeed, the painter produced works that were exhibited in the studio of Giulio Della Torre, his mentor, friend, sculptor and collector. The section is dedicated to the ideal and digital reconstruction of the studiolo: in addition to Caroto’s canvases, a bronze and medals cast by the gentleman, archaeological (statues, busts) and naturalistic (especially fossils) artifacts will be exhibited, evoking the phenomenon of the birth of wunderkammer, the “chambers of wonders,” which in Verona has exemplary roots in composite collections such as that of Della Torre and in the 16th-century museum of Francesco Calzolari. The ninth and final section, Giovanni Caroto Witness to Antiquity, speaks of Roman Verona coming to life again through the eyes of Giovanni Caroto in the reliefs of ancient monuments taken from one of his manuscripts belonging to the Biblioteca Civica di Verona. The sheets will be presented alongside the printed edition of Antiquities of Verona (1560) and artifacts from the Archaeological Museum at the Roman Theater that testify to the interest in collecting and studying antiquity in sixteenth-century Verona. Thanks to virtual reconstructions, the public will be able to identify with the gaze of a 16th-century contemporary turned to the memories of the past.

The initiative is supported by a wide network of collaborations, in particular with the Diocese of Verona, the University of Verona and the relevant Superintendence, and plans to offer the community an artistic and cultural city itinerary for the public in the city churches for which Caroto worked and in other museum venues that hold works by the painter, such as the G.B. Cavalcaselle Fresco Museum at Juliet’s Tomb and the Archaeological Museum at the Roman Theater. The exhibition is organized thanks to the participation of major national and international museum institutions and private collectors who have lent their support, including the Fondazione Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, the Palazzo di San Sebastiano and the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, the Galleria Estense in Modena, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Scientific partner of the exhibition: Palazzo Ducale in Mantua.

In the valuable volume presented last November 2, after the two full-bodied introductory essays by Francesca Rossi and Edoardo Rossetti, Stefano L’Occaso illustrates the artist’s Mantuan activity, while investigating “a painter traveling between Milan and Casale Monferrato” are Massimiliano Caldera and Edoardo Rossetti. The medallic production of the artist and Giulio Della Torre is fully analyzed by Antonella Arzone, while Sergio Marinelli focuses on Caroto’s “Suffered Affirmation.” Gianni Peretti illustrates the Master’s portraitist activity and his paintings for Giulio Della Torre’s studiolo. His brother Giovanni Caroto is dealt with by Francesco Marcorin, who investigates his probable activity as an architect, while Margherita Bolla dwells on Giovanni Caroto antiquarian. The Appendix is rich, with papers on “Itineraries. Giovan Francesco and Giovanni Caroto in the Churches of Verona” (Alessandra Zamperni); “The Carotos and Veronese Literary Culture” by Lorenzo Carpanè; and “Around the Caroto’s Apothecary Shop. Natural history in the 16th century and the contribution of the Veronese” (Leonardo Latella). Completing the articulate publication are a detailed Regesto dei documenti (Edoardo Rossetti), "I fratelli Caroto nelle Vite di Giorgio Vasari 1550 e 1568) by the same Rossetti, “Le fonti per la fortuna di Giovan Francesco e Giovanni Caroto” (Tania Fontana and Greta Gazzaniga), “La presenza di opere dei fratelli Caroto nelle collezioni storiche veronesi” (Gianni Peretti) and, finally, an updated bibliography. To complete a very dense volume, fundamental for the knowledge of the artist, enriched by an extensive iconographic set and an elegant graphic layout.

A major exhibition on Giovan Francesco Caroto to be held in Verona in 2022

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