Renaissance at the National Gallery of Australia

Giovan Battista Moroni
Bambina della Famiglia Redetti, 1566-70

Next December a new exhibition will be on display at the National Gallery of Australia: "Renaissance: Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Bellini". 


The works of these artists and other eminent artists executed by Italian artists between the 15th and 16th century will come to Australia for the first time.


These works, now part of the collection of the Accademia Carra, where once own by the merchant and collector Giacomo Carrara, who died in 1796. Until recently the collection was looked after by a Trust, to then pass under the jurisdiction of the city of Bergamo, that amplified the collection, thanks to gifts and donations of other private collectors.


Today in the Collection is possible to count more than 1,800 artworks, including masterworks by Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Botticelli and Raphael.

Titian,
Madonna with Child, 1510

                                                                                     Due to restructuring/maintenance of the Accademia Carrara, around seventy artworks will be borrowed by the National Gallery of Australia and they will be on display for the first time on the Australian sole. 


This occasion will be a wonderful opportunity for art lovers, researchers and public, who will see with their own eyes works that hardly leave Italy due their fragility, value and conservation concern. 


Between the many works, there will also be the "Madonna and Child" by Titian, which will travel so far to come to Australia in December for about 4 months. 


Don't miss this occasion... go and enjoy this event! 



A presto!!
Simona

Next week in Melbourne

Melbourne Central by Simona

Next week I will be in Melbourne to present a paper at the ACIS Sixth Biennale Conference (Italian Studies - New Directions), but also to enjoy the city. 

Between the many things going on all the time there, I have found that there will be an interesting exhibition presentation at the Italian Institute of Culture on July 14th by Anna Caione, who will be discussing her current body of work influenced by her Italian heritage and journeys to Italy.  

Fabrics by Anna Caione

Anna Caione teaches Art and Design at tertiary level in Melbourne. She has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Her work is represented in corporate, public and private collections in Australia, Italy, Holland and Ireland. Anna Caione is represented by Catherine Asquith gallery, Melbourne http://www.catherineasquithgallery.com

The Madonna di Senigallia in the Marche region

I remember Senigallia as a young kid, when my cousin with her family were used to spend two weeks of their holiday vacation in Senigallia, while my parents and I we were regular customer of a small hotel along Miramare di Rimini, along the "romagnola"coast.

Between June 18th and July 10th there will be an exhibition in Senigallia to commemorate this beautiful artwork of Piero della Francesca, so why not use the occasion to go there and spend some beautiful days on the beach and walk around the small centre to enjoy some galleries and some good food!!!

Madonna di Senigallia
Piero della Francesca 

The Madonna di Senigallia is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, an early Renaissance artist, active between Urbino, Borgo San Sepolcro, Ferrara and Rimini. 


This work was most probably commissioned by Federico da Montefeltro for the daughter marriage with Giovanni della Rovere, sir of Senigallia. The painting was in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie extra moenia of Senigallia (Marche) until 1917, when the artwork was removed for security reasons. 

Recently the artwork has been restored, th showed the high quality of Piero della Francesca's treatment of light, as well as the influence of Flemish masters on it in details such as the basket with linen gauze, the coral and the fabric covering the Madonna's head. The light, which realistically enters from the window on the left, is a symbol of the Virgin's conception. The linen in the basket is instead an allusion to her purity, while the case for hosts in the shelf and the coral hanging from Jesus' necklace both hint to the Eucharist sacrifice. The staring, thoughtful immobility of all the characters would be also an allusion to the latter.

The painting, originally in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Urbino, is quite different from Piero's previous production. The faces still have an expression of aloofness and of superior rational wisdom, but they also convey a sense of precious, almost exotic, beauty. This is one of the paintings in which the artist most clearly reveals his interst in light values, both in terms of reflections and of magical transparencies. From Mary's veil, slightly puckered on her forehead with subtle light variations, to the coral necklace around the Child's neck, to the angels' shining pearls - these are all effects which, together with the light streaming in from the window, and forming a perfectly geometrical shape on the end wall, will appear again and again in Dutch painting of the 17th century.

Caravaggio in Bitonto

The city of Bitonto, in the Puglia region, for its history and the extraordinary evidence that this has left in the territory is set up as a city of art with a museum waiting to be configured in its best potential. 

For the next two months the beautiful gallery will host another interesting exhibition on Caravaggio entitled:

Echi Caravaggeschi in Puglia 

In this occasion approximately sixty works will be on display: portraits, religious, mythological, biblical and still life scenes from private collections, churches and museums all over Puglia will  look into the influence of Caravaggio in the region during the first decade of the seventeenth century.

The Gallery has a considerable number of paintings and drawings, most probably executed between the sixteenth and early twentieth century. Moreover there is a small collection of contemporary artworks. 

The wide variety of works in the gallery is, without doubts, one of the reasons why this museum is highly appreciated amongst art lovers. In fact, 

most of the collection consists of a big variety of artworks, by Italian artists such as Giovanni da Rimini, Titian and Veronese, or international artists, such as Fussli, Hamilton, Gros, Delacroix and Winterhalter. The collection has been donated by the Devanna brothers to the Italian State and today are part of the Italian patrimony.

For more information:

Galleria Nazionale della Puglia

DON'T MISS THE OCCASION!!

Caravaggio - between Rome and Milan

Last year many exhibitions have been organized all over Italy to celebrate the fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death, including the solo exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale, where majors artworks of Caravaggio were on display.

This year in contemporaneousness, Rome and Milan have something new to display:

Palazzo Venezia in ROME will show the results of the x-ray carried out on the three paintings of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi: Martyrdom of St Matthew, Call of St Matthew, and St Matthew and the Angel. 

The results of these exams are extraordinary, they show the techniques used by Caravaggio, his pentimenti and the compositional changes.  

Particular in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

The exhibition is in:

Palazzo Venezia, 

Via del Plebiscito 118,

10 March -15 October 2011

MILAN, instead, will  present an exhibition on "Gli occhi di Caravaggio" at the Museo Diocesano curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.

This new exhibition illustrates the birth of the genius Caravaggio. Reconstructing his artistic training, from Simone Peterzano to the Veneto and Lombard masters, this fascinating show examines the precursors and contemporaries of Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), highlighting the works that the artist would actually have seen and what he would have witnessed in the artistic climate that dominated the area from Venice to Milan before he moved to Rome, which according to the most recent studies was likely to have been around 1595-96.

The exhibition gathers around sixty masterpieces by the greatest painters of the day, including Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Lorenzo Lotto, Jacopo da Bassano, Moretto da Brescia, Giovan Battista Moroni, Gerolamo Savoldo, Vincenzo and Antonio Campi, Giovanni Ambrogio Figino, Simone Peterzano, and many more, some of which have never been exhibited before, document the formation of a groundbreaking aesthetic and an innovative conception of the human figure and its relationship with space and light, which was fundamental to the development of the young Merisi.

Naturally Caravaggio himself could not left out, and the exhibition includes some extremely significant works. One of these is the so-called “Murtola Medusa”, the first version of the famous shield in the Uffizi Galleries, which takes its name from the poet who wrote a poem about it in 1600.

This work, which has always belonged to a private collection, was created by Caravaggio in 1596 and can be viewed as emblematic of his formative years, in particular due to the under drawing which was brought to light by recent in depth scientific investigations. The same techniques have been used to date the shield to between 1596 and 1597, the period when Caravaggio moved to Rome. Conceptually speaking, in this way the Murtola Medusa closes the painter’s Lombard period and opens the Roman one, when, as Vittorio Sgarbi recalls: “he suddenly transformed everything, to the point that the shock waves of his revolution reached the whole of Europe, and there was not one great painter who did not come from France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands to see what Caravaggio had done”.

The exhibition is in:

Museo Diocesano from 11 March to 3 July 2011.

SO IF YOU GO TO ITALY, YOU CAN CHOOSE BETWEEN ROME AND MILAN!!

Buon proseguimento!!

Lorenzo Lotto: a master artist at the Scuderie del Quirinale

Lorenzo Lotto, Annunciation, Pinacoteca Comunale, Recanati

I remember seeing this artwork, the "Annunciation" by Lorenzo Lotto in Melbourne about nine years ago. This work was the cover of the book: "Titian to Tiepolo: Three centuries of Italian Art", an exhibition which traveled around Australia and other continents with a selection of Italian artworks, including Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation from Recanati.

This year the Scuderie del Quirinale celebrates this artist with a wonderful exhibition: it will consider the whole story of the artist painting, his existential works within the triangle Treviso, Bergamo and some small towns in the Marche by highlighting and enhancing the poetry of a man of the fifteenth century, his successful and  completely original and independent works to reconcile the traditional elements of great painting of his time, anticipating the Baroque era.

Lorenzo, in fact, starting from the suggestions of compositions by Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, learned to look into the human soul to tell us a story. Just think of those light flashes or the cold way of cutting perspective planes: they are the antithesis of the soft and the merger of coloristic contemporary Giorgione. Its composition is held, instead, according to tight schedules, highlighted by the intertwining of looks and attitudes varied characters, often set in an particular atmosphere but linked by the realism of the details and with a view of nature felt as a mysterious and disturbing. 

A complex human story, then, narrated through a selection of key works, will help the viewer to love Lorenzo Lotto. 

The art exhibition will be at the Scuderie del Quirinale between March 2nd and june 12th. Don't miss it!!

Another reason for visiting Rome: Annibale Carracci in Palazzo Farnese

Annibale Carracci

Palazzo Farnese, one of the most beautiful palaces in Rome, open to the public to display his art collection from the Renaissance to the present. It was commissioned by Alessandro Farnese (1468-1549), who in 1534 become Pope Paul III. The building, begun in 1514 by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, continued under the direction of Michelangelo (1546-1549), then finally by Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, who completed it in 1589.

The Cardinals Ranuccio, and Edward Alexander Farnese, Paul III's descendants, entrusted to the major artists of the pictorial decoration of the halls of representation: towards 1560, the Great Hall of the Fasti Farnese, around 1600, the dressing room, then the Carracci's gallery, where you can admire the beautiful works by Annibale Carracci. 

In the past Palazzo Farnese was purchased from France and then sold to Italy. Since 1936 the palace, located in Piazza Farnese, just off Campo dei Fiori,  host the French embassy.

For anyone with a passion for art I would highly recommend this exhibition!

For opening hours have a look to the link below:

Palazzo Farnese

Botticelli in Milan

Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Sandro Botticelli.

From today at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum there is an exhibition on Sandro Botticelli. The exhibition celebrates the 500th anniversary of the death of the great master Botticelli presenting works belonging to pubblic collections from Lombardy and Milan.

For more information have a look to the museum site:

Museo Poldi Pezzoli

1861. I pittori del Risorgimento

1861 marked the Unification of Italy. To celebrate this event a significant exhibition has been organized at the Scuderie del Quirinale between 6th October 2010 and 16th January 2011. 

The exhibition shows how Italian painters depicted the events that led our country to the achievement of independence and national unity between 1859 and 1861. On display works by Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe Molteni, Domenico and Gerolamo Induno, Eleuterio Pagliano, Federico Faruffini, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Odoardo Borrani, Michele Cammarano, Giuseppe Sciuti and others.

On the balcony of the Scuderie del Quirinale

On the night of the opening, 5th October, I went to the Scuderie del Quirinale to see the well presented exhibition. 


The works, the draperies and environments were perfect for this historical exhibition....having the Palazzo del Quirinale, residence of the President of Italy, just on the other side of the square.

For any information:

Where: Scuderie del Quirinale

Info +39.06.39967500

Address: Via XXIV Maggio 16 - Rome

E-mail: info.sdq@palaexpo.it

Web-site: www.scuderiequirinale.it