Among the mountains of Trentino, an enigmatic Last Supper: Ferdinando Valdambrini in Tiarno di Sotto

Tiarno di Sotto is a quiet hamlet of just a few houses nestled among the meadows of the Ledro valley, in that part of Trentino where the inhabitants’ speech has the narrow, closed, sharp sounds of the dialects of the Lombard valleys. Together with its counterpart that lies higher up, Tiarno di Sopra, it is the first village one encounters on the way up from the Brescia mountains, after crossing the steep cliffs of the Giudicarie: having passed the Ampola waterfall, the harsh and severe profile of the rock dissolves, as in a dream with a happy ending, into the vision of a great green expanse, gentle and soothing, that continues as far as Lake Ledro, protected on both sides by the slopes that slide gently between fir forests.

From the highway, the bell tower of the church of Tiarno di Sotto, dedicated to St. Bartholomew, can be recognized from afar. The inhabitants are proud of their bell tower: panels and guides remind us that, at seventy-two meters high, it is the second highest in Trentino. It is nineteenth-century, just like the façade, which does not correspond to that of the original building: at that time the orientation of the church was changed, so it underwent massive renovations. The previous appearance, therefore, was largely lost. What has remained, however, are the works of art, the real reason for visiting this church in the mountains. On the high altar stands a Venetian polyptych from 1587, still searching for the name of its author. Just beyond the entrance is an interesting Madonna with Saints Vigilius and Hermagoras attributed to Martino Teofilo Polacco, once in Trento Cathedral (the predella is in the Tridentine Diocesan Museum). Also, a Descent of the Holy Spirit possibly by Ignatius Unterberger. The ceiling is frescoed by Agostino Aldi, from Mantua but active mainly in Trentino in the early 20th century. And then, the most enigmatic and interesting painting, although penalized by a location too high to allow it to be properly admired: it is aLast Supper executed by Ferdinando Valdambrini. An artist about whom we know little more than nothing, although his canvas is a work of great quality.

It is, meanwhile, the only work of his known to us. Its author’s name would suggest a Lombard origin: Val d’Ambria is located among the Orobie Valtellinesi, and Abbot Pietro Zani, a scholar and historiographer from Fidenza who worked between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, also mentions the painter in his Enciclopedia metodica critico-ragionata delle belle arti as “Ferdinando di Valdambria” and “Ferdinando Valdambrino,” pointing out, however, that “he was said to be Roman, for having made his studj in Rome.” However, there are also older reports: Carlo Torre, in his 1674 Ritratto di Milano (the first guide ever published on the city), mentions “a Roman called Ferdinando Valdambrino,” who “operated in the chapel of St. William Duke of Aquitaine the Table in which we see the Virgin and Child Son, and the Holy Duke.” Other early commentators refer to a Milanese activity of the painter, but as early as 1719 Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi admitted that he knew nothing more than the information gathered by Torre. Again, Francesco Bartoli, in his Notizie delle pitture, sculture ed architetture d’Italia speaks of an altarpiece depicting the Transito della Vergine, signed and dated 1653, and kept in the church of the monastery of San Felice in Pavia. We then know that there is a “Ferdinando Romano” recorded between 1685 and 1690 among the members of the College of Painters in Venice (and since a document that says he is “67 years old” is from 1690, it is possible to derive the year of his birth from that data). It is also interesting to recall the existence of a Roman Ferdinando Valdambrini who, between 1646 and 1647, published a Libro d’intavolatura di chitarra a cinque ordini in two volumes, a collection of music that had some success. “There is a faint possibility,” musicologist James Tyler has written, “that this is the Roman painter Ferdinando Valdambrini.” It is not known, however, on what basis he makes this claim, although the coincidence of name, era and city is indeed very curious. He is, in short, a character yet to be studied, and it is not unlikely that by looking in Venice or Rome something new will emerge.

In any case, at the moment we can only get an idea of Valdambrini’s artistic identity from theLast Supper at Tiarno di Sotto, signed and dated: on the lower border it reads “1666 / Ferdinando Valdambrini / Romano fecit,” and then next to it “Ferdinan[dus] / Valdambri/ nus Romanus.” It is not a canvas that stands out for particularly refined formal solutions: it is, sic et simpliciter, the story of a dinner, similar to many paintings of the same subject that were being produced in early 17th-century Venice, the cultural milieu to which the Tiarno di Sotto painting can be referred. The table, covered with a white tablecloth that, according to the custom of the time, was laid on top of an oriental-style rug, is set with a lamb, loaves of bread, cups of wine, and various cutlery. The form is typical of the last Venetian dinners of the time: the table in the center, in a frontal view, with all the characters behind, around Christ, except for two who stand on the other side, at opposite ends. Valdambrini’s Judas, who hides with his hand the bag of thirty denarii behind his back, is an almost literal quotation of the Judas painted by Tintoretto in theLast Supper at San Marcuola, in 1547: a motif that had a certain fortune, also taken up by other artists (for example, by Cesare da Conegliano in theLast Supper of the Holy Apostles in Venice).

A painting, then, with a vintage flavor, one might say using an anachronism: formulas, sources and chromatics recall the atmospheres of 16th-century Venetian painting. “The compositional scheme,” wrote art historian Elvio Mich noting affinities between Valdambrini and Girolamo Forabosco, "refers back [...] to recurrent models in Venetian painting of the sixteenth-seventeenth century; but alongside a generic reference to the Cene tintorettesche , it is above all the chromatic assumption that places Valdambrini in the lagoon pictorial climate, within the neo-sixteenth-century current.“ Ferdinando Valdambrini’s color, spread with mellow brushstrokes to define forms without recourse to drawing, and declined according to a ”medium chromatic scale of mother-of-pearl intonation and with a few bright notes of red, green and blue,“ touches a quality ”of absolute relevance," Mich points out. The whole is made modern, however, by the vivid realism of the still life pieces, and by the stark, almost grotesque realism of the characters, commoners with the stubby hands of those accustomed to heavy labor, whose round, broad faces are furrowed by deep wrinkles and aged by fatigue. Even Jesus, foreboding what will happen to him, fixes his eyes on those of the relative with a weary expression crossing his bony, tried face. Modern then is the Roman recollection of the blade of light that enters through the window in the left corner, illuminates the two doves perched on the curtain stand, invests the turban of the attendant standing immediately below them, and ends up being lost in the diffuse light of the room, a large, terracotta-paved hall with niches in the walls and small windows. From the one on the right, a further piece of everyday life, a woman shaking a cloth also appears.

The figure of the gentleman in the abyss, holding a coat of arms with an anchor in his left hand, may provide us with the story of how Valdambrini’s work was born: we do not know his identity, but it is not difficult to imagine that he was one of the many inhabitants of the Ledro valley who had moved to Venice in the seventeenth century to work in the maritime trade and who, eager to keep alive their ties with their homeland, commissioned paintings from painters active in the lagoon, with whom they would later decorate the churches of the valley. This explains the relatively conspicuous presence of interesting seventeenth-century paintings in the churches of Ledro: the best known is the splendid altarpiece by Bernardo Strozzi in the church of Tiarno di Sopra, which returned to the attention of the art chronicles in 2019 for its glittering restoration, which took place under the eyes of visitors to the Mart in Rovereto. They are witnesses to a widespread heritage that manifests itself with unexpected heights even where few would expect it.

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