A Holy Family by the "Caravaggio of Verona": the mysterious Pietro Bernardi

Pietro Bernardi is an elusive artist. We know little more than nothing about him: “always mysterious and poorly documented,” art historian Sergio Marinelli called him in a 2016 essay. He was active in Verona for a few years at the turn of the second and third decade of the seventeenth century, and this is known to us from the scant documents about him, and from the scant biographical notes reserved for him by Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, author, in 1718, of a treatise entitled Le vite de’ pittori, degli scultori et architetti veronesi. But even the reports of Dal Pozzo, who declares him a pupil of Domenico Fetti, are few and confused: in certain passages his works are interchanged with those of another Bernardi, Francesco, known as “il Bigolaro,” and not even on the date of his demise provided by the biographer, 1623, can we be sure, since a will of his from 1619 has been found, which could anticipate, albeit slightly, the date of his departure. We do not even know his date of birth, which is presumed to be in the 1680s.

Until fifty years ago his figure was almost completely obscure: it took the work of a talented art historian, Maddalena Salazzari Brognara, to begin the reconstruction of his personality, as far as possible. In a pioneering 1966 article published in the journal Arte antica e moderna, the scholar called him “the earliest Veronese Caravaggesque,” because despite the very scarce evidence of his production (suffice it to say that there are three documented works in all: the two small paintings in the church of San Carlo in Verona and the Holy Family with Saints Joachim and Anne formerly in Isola della Scala and now in the Castelvecchio Museum), what little we know is enough to imagine very close contacts with Caravaggio. Because one fact, at least, is certain: no one else in Verona was closer to Caravaggio than Pietro Bernardi, and above all no one was earlier than him in his closeness to the Lombard (for all works referable to Bernardi, dates to the 1710s have been proposed). So close was he to Caravaggio as to suggest that there were no mediators between him and the great Michelangelo Merisi, and that the Veronese had inferred his knowledge of Caravaggio by directly observing his works in Rome.

Having no documentary evidence, it is necessary to work on the imagination, and to imagine a young Bernardi leaving his city for some time, staying in Rome around 1610, even before the three artists who, until before his rediscovery, were considered the importers of Caravaggism in Verona, namely Marcantonio Bassetti, Pasquale Ottino and Alessandro Turchi, and returning to his native city with a renewed wealth of experience. A background that made him a “faithful interpreter of Merisi, completely freed [...] from any residue of mannerist culture,” Salazzari Brogna recalls. Indeed, the art historian discerns in his way of quoting Caravaggio, with punctual and direct mentions, a doing typical of the artists closest to Merisi: Orazio Gentileschi, Orazio Borgianni, Carlo Saraceni. To whom Pietro Bernardi could be safely approached. For Sergio Marinelli, Bernardi is “among the earliest and most outspoken proponents of realism in Verona.” And this is what one thinks when observing a painting of his that has been dated to about 1610, and is kept at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona: it is a Holy Family with Saints John and Elizabeth, which entered the Veronese institute with the bequest of the collector Cesare Bernasconi in 1871.

Pietro Bernardi, Holy Family with Saints John and Elizabeth (ca. 1610; oil on canvas, 136 x 166 cm; Verona, Musei Civici, inv. 5809-1B30). Photo by Gabriele Toso, Padua. © Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

The Virgin and St. Joseph stand at the sides of the composition, watching over the infant Jesus and St. John by candlelight, while St. Elizabeth turns her gaze to St. Joseph. The dim light barely illuminates the faces of the two old men, while a brighter glow invests the teenage Mary and the two little ones, suggesting another source of light, external to the edges of the painting. The figures are described with a rough, almost sharp realism: something entirely new in Verona in those years. On the lower left corner is a basket with a kitten asleep on a white cloth, a piece of everyday family life that enters this nocturne with its somber background and hints at those qualities of naturamortista that Salazzari Brognara had well described.

It is a painting that is still rather schematic, almost elementary: these are the terms that have suggested a very early date. The Holy Family once in Isola della Scala, if one wanted to make a comparison, is already a more shrewd and aware painting, although the more vivid sentimentalism that transpires from the youthful work probably succeeds in making the latter more palatable to today’s public. But this naiveté does not diminish the value of the painting; on the contrary: it places it in a position of precedence over other works known or attributed to Pietro Bernardi, and may provide more than a little help in reconstructing a career about which nothing is known.

It is the work of a very young painter, who was probably not yet in his thirties, and who here seems almost to have been influenced by the Caravaggesque painters of Holland, from whom he may have drawn inspiration for the subject of the candlelight nocturne: the effects of artificial light were, moreover, typical of Nordic Caravaggism. Consider that in the past this Holy Family was also attributed to one of the greatest Dutch Caravaggists, Gerrit van Honthorst. The assignment to Pietro Bernardi is for stylistic reasons: the Virgin, for example, shows remarkable similarities to theAnnunciation from the church of San Fermo in Verona, which was ascribed to him as early as Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, with a date of 1617. The compositional scheme, with the two seated and facing figures at the sides and the third in the middle, recalls that of the Holy Family already at Isola della Scala. Instead, the theme of Baby Jesus and St. John embracing refers back to the Veronese tradition: a shining example is the Madonna and Child and St. John by Giovan Francesco Caroto passed at auction by Wannenes on December 21, 2020. Understanding, however, the soil from which this work sprouted is a feat bordering on the impossible.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to understand why the figure of Pietro Bernardi has been forgotten. In the 1730s, Verona opened up to a varied culture, and the painters who stayed in Rome bringing back from their trip the Caravaggesque elements of their art (it was mentioned above which ones they were: Bassetti, Ottino, and Turchi, all of whom were destined to be far more successful than Bernardi, especially Turchi) never demonstrated the strict observance that Bernardi’s paintings, on the contrary, denote, because the taste of Veronese collectors and patrons demanded an eclecticism that is found with fullness in the works of the “group of three,” as Salazzari Brognara calls it. Bernardi, however, died before he could bring himself up to date with the new directives of local taste: so today, very little remains of that early Caravaggesque, of that meteor that ploughed the Veronese skies for a few years in the early seventeenth century, either among the paintings or the documents. The studies, however, continue: Marinelli, just five years ago, discovered an unsuspected soul of him as an assiduous and talented draughtsman, not immune to smears and naiveté, but also capable of giving the faces “a character of mysterious power of the unfinished,” capable of tracing on paper passages of “almost nineteenth-century realism,” or of giving evidence to his figures with vivid and strong lights. What emerges is not only an atypical Caravaggesque, given the quantity and frequency of his drawings, but it even results in a personality that is “at times grandiose,” says Marinelli, though difficult to relate to the fragmentary painting. It is a personality that deserves and only waits to be studied longer, because there are still many surprises in store.

If you enjoyed this article, read the previous ones in the same series: Gabriele Bella’sConcert; Plinio Nomellini’s The Red Nymph;Guercino’s Apparition ofChrist to His Mother; Titian’s Magdalene; Vittorio Zecchin’sOne Thousand and One Nights; Lorenzo Lotto’sTransfiguration; Jacopo Vignali’sTobias and the Angel; Luigi Russolo’s Perfume; and Antonio Fontanesi’sNovember; Cosmè Tura’s Saint Maurelius Tondos; Simone dei Crocifissi’s Madonna and Child and Angels; Francesco Gioli’sBalances at the Mouth dArno; Pellizza da Volpedo’sMirror of Life; Elisabetta Sirani’sGalatea; Masaccio and Masolino’s ,Sant’Anna Metterza; Fausto Melotti’sChristmas Metrò; Luca Cambiaso’s Madonna of the Candle; Gaetano Previati’sDance of the Hours.

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