The Renaissance in the South, from Antonello da Messina to Jacomart Baço, from Gagini to Donatello. A major exhibition in Matera

From April 19 to August 19, 2019, the National Museum of Medieval and Modern Art of Basilicata in Palazzo Lanfranchi in Matera is hosting the exhibition Renaissance Seen from the South. Matera, Southern Italy and the Mediterranean between the 15th and 16th centuries, curated by Marta Ragozzino, Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Matteo Ceriana and Dora Catalano. A wide-ranging exhibition, with two hundred works from various Italian and European museums, to document how the Renaissance developed between the 15th and 16th centuries insouthern Italy, with an expanded vision to include the Mediterranean context. The exhibition thus aims to overturn the traditional viewpoint on one of the most important art-historical periods and wants to offer a new reading of the Renaissance, highlighting the centrality of Mediterranean routes, exchanges and relationships between cultures, and the travels of artists and their works.

The great materana exhibition “reveals,” says Marta Ragozzino, “the powerful network of cultural circulations and exchanges, between north and south but also between east and west, that saw Basilicata and the South become the natural epicenter of ideas, innovations, cultures. From Flanders to Spain, from Constantinople to Venice, Florence and Rome. To nurture the flowering of an alternative artistic vicissitude to the well-known and paradigmatic one of the capitals of the Renaissance, the precious fruit of an extraordinary meridian koiné. Of which it seems important to recognize and read the dynamics, protagonists and co-players, and whose gravitational center soon became Naples, already an ’international’ cultural capital in the 14th century under the most important Angevin kings, particularly during the reign of King Robert. Proposing an interdisciplinary rereading, attentive to the dialectic between center and periphery.”

The exhibition project aims to offer a perspective that looks at the sea, its routes, coasts and landings (ports, markets, cities) that over the centuries have brought cultures and peoples closer together, as a great wealth and opportunity, not as one to a separation or barrier (referring back to classic works such as Predrag Matvejevic’s Mediterranean Breviary or the more recent research flowing into David Abulafia’s Great Sea ). Basilicata was chosen as the venue for the exhibition not only because Matera is European Capital of Culture 2019, but also because, although it is an inland, defiladed and mountainous land, it nevertheless faces two seas, and has always been, despite its complicated orography, a land of passage and welcome, a region of intersection, encounter and connection, a transit route for peoples and cultures, a hinge and not a barrier, a gateway between West and East.

Because of this incessant dialectic between peripheries and centers (in which Matera with its special history also lies), because of the importance of exchanges and contaminations, especially in the current historical phase, thinking of Europe and its richness made of multiplicity and diversity, the curators have imagined a broader narrative, which aims to relate the reconstruction of local history and its protagonists (reread through a small nucleus of punctual Lucanian presences in the exhibition and opportune itineraries that instead allow the enhancement of all the emergencies of the territory: frescoes, polyptychs and individual works) with a larger and more differentiated history. Frame or connective tissue that restores the Mediterranean koine in all its Western and Eastern declinations, without forgetting the southern side of the sea, the Islamic shore with its specific traditions and cultural contaminations, increasingly important after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The exhibition, will follow a chronological progression intertwined with a thematic scan. The public will be able to see paintings, sculptures, miniatures, medals, goldsmiths, tapestries, textiles, majolica, books and prints, but also precious objects, maps, pilot books, navigational instruments, all with the aim of focusing on a history different from that developed in the great capitals of the center and north, such as Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome, albeit continuously interconnected to the events and languages that characterized these capitals. “Among the main works on display,” state the curators, "is the fifteenth-century Carta del navegar by Albino da Canepa, along with many other Maps, Mappamondi, Portolani and navigational instruments. Jacopo de’ Barbari’s great Perspective Plan of Venice compared with the View of Naples from the Museum of San Martino, medals and illuminated folios that tell of the protagonists of the historical events that the exhibition illustrates, accompanied by the majestic Coronation of Ferrante I D’Aragona from the Bargello. The Martyrdom of Saint Lucy by Martorell from Barcelona with the recently restored Saint Lucy by Alvaro Pirez of Nola. TheAdoration of the Magi taken from Van Eyck alongside the Flemish master’sMan with a Ring from Sibiu, valuable works by Colantonio and Antonello da Messina, including the tablets from Reggio Calabria. Two works by Jacomart Baço alongside works by Spanish painters active in Sardinia such as Thomas and Figuera. Plus Francesco Laurana, Domenico Gagini, Andrea Guardi, and Donatello’s superb Horse’s Head from the MAN in Naples. Bartolomeo Vivarini’s Annunciation from Modugno, Lazzaro Bastiani’s St. Jerome from Monopoli, Michele da Valona’s polyptych from Guglionesi, to illustrate the give-and-take relationships on the Adriatic shore. And then textiles, books, codices, one of the busts of Charles V by Montorsoli, the Portrait of Sultan Suleiman by Hieronymus Hopfer, but above all the Preparatory Study for Raphael’s Madonna del Pesce and related works by Cesare da Sesto, Girolamo da Salerno, Giovan Francesco Penni, Giovan Filippo Criscuolo and the remarkable Andrea Sabatini. Large polyptychs from inland Basilicata and Venetian works that arrived on the Apulian shore, including paintings by Lotto, Pordenone, Paris Bordon and other works that will surprise visitors to end with masterpieces by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Pedro Machuca." Also, comparisons between north and south, with works by Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Bartolomeo Vivarini, Antoniazzo Romano and many others.

More information can be found on the Matera European Capital of Culture 2019 website.

Image: Antonello da Messina, Abraham and the Angels (tempera and oil on panel, 21.2 x 29.3 cm; Reggio Calabria, Pinacoteca Civica)

The Renaissance in the South, from Antonello da Messina to Jacomart Baço, from Gagini to Donatello. A major exhibition in Matera

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