Exhibition | The Tapestry Collection of the Petit Palais
Now on view in Nancy, as noted at Arachné, a research group blog dedicated to tapestries:
Chefs-d’œuvre de la tapisserie: La collection du Petit Palais, Paris
Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 25 October 2013 — 27 January 2014
Curated by Charles Villeneuve de Janti and Patrick Lemasson
Le Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, possède l’une des plus belles collections de tapisseries des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Issues de grandes manufactures européennes, elles furent élaborées et tissées en matériaux précieux d’après les cartons de peintres majeurs tels que Le Brun, Champaigne, Boucher, à l’instar du carton pour La Destruction du Palais d’Armide par Charles Coypel, l’un des chefs-d’œuvre du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy.
Ces œuvres, pouvant mesurer jusqu’à 5 mètres de hauteur, permettront aux visiteurs de découvrir un art de cour spectaculaire faisant écho à celui dévoilé dans l’exposition L’Automne de la Renaissance : d’Arcimboldo à Caravage. Pour des raisons de conservation, ces pièces sont très rarement présentées au public. Ce prêt du Petit Palais constitue donc une faveur exceptionnelle.
Didier Rykner provides a review at La Tribune de l’Art (4 November 2013).
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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:
Patrick Lemasson, Chefs d’oeuvres de la Tapisserie: La collection du Petit Palais, Paris (Milan: Silvana, 2013), 72 pages, ISBN: 978-8836627257, $29.
New Book | Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House
From Manchester UP:
Gill Perry, Kate Retford and Jordan Vibert, eds., Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0719090394, £70.
This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces—the closet, the gallery, the library—and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict.
Gill Perry is Professor of Art History at the Open University. Kate Retford is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. Jordan Vibert is a freelance researcher
specialising in eighteenth-century art and culture.
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Introduction: Placing faces in the country house
Part 1: A Walk around the House
1. The topography of the conversation piece: A walk around Wanstead – Kate Retford
2. Life in the library – Susie West
3. Marble, memory and theatre: Portraiture and the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth – Alison Yarrington
Part 2: Women’s Space?
4. Dirty dancing at Knole: Portraits of Giovanna Baccelli and the performance of ‘Public Intimacy’ – Gill Perry
5. ‘Necessary, usefull, easy and delightfull’: The production and display of pastel portraits in the English country house – Ruth Kenny
6. Georgiana at Althorp: Spencer family portraits 1755–1783 – Emma Barker
Part 3: Imperial Designs
7. Commemorating Captain Cook in the country estate – Harriet Guest
8. Framing Sir Francis: Lady Anne Stanhope and the corruption of civic masculinity – Jordan Vibert
9. The Waterloo Chamber before the Battle of Waterloo – Desmond Shawe Taylor
Bibliography
Index
Display | Gainsborough and the Landscape of Refinement
As noted at ArtDaily (2 December 2013) . . .
Master Drawings New York | Gainsborough and the Landscape of Refinement
Lowell Libson at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 24 January — 1 February 2014
Thomas Gainsborough, Figures Resting in Woodland Landscape, signed 1784, 232 x 291 (Lowell Libson)
The exhibition is centered round a group of landscape drawings made by Gainsborough in the last two decades of his life but includes twelve drawings by Gainsborough spanning the full length of his career, from Gainsborough’s earliest recorded landscape study—completed when the artist was only 18—to a preparatory drawing for one of his last ‘Fancy pictures’ A Boy with a Cat, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which was completed the year before his death. Three of the drawings are previously unpublished and exhibited to the public for the first time here.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was one of the Britain’s greatest artists, famed for his engaging portraits and evocative landscape paintings, he is also universally acknowledged as one of the finest European draughtsman of the eighteenth century. Despite this reputation, there have been very few exhibitions dedicated to Gainsborough’s drawings. These are not topographical works but imagined landscapes which Gainsborough created by drawing models he created using rocks and wood found in his garden and, as one writer noted, ‘distant woods of broccoli.’
Gainsborough was fascinated by a limited number of landscape features—herds of cattle, serpentine roads, clumps of trees and hilly horizons—often obsessively playing with these features time and time again, each time creating completely new works. This creative repetition—or refinement—was given expression in Gainsborough’s fascination with different techniques.
No two drawings in the exhibition are handled in the same way as Gainsborough explored different combinations of chalks, pencil, ink washes and watercolour in each work. Many of the drawings in the exhibition have provenances stretching back to the eighteenth century, one is inscribed as a present from ‘the ingenious artist’ to the daughter of a friend, another was in the collection of the celebrated surgeon, Dr John Hunter, who treated Gainsborough in his final illness. This group is the largest concentration of Gainsborough drawings to be offered by an art gallery since the celebrated exhibition mounted by Knoedler in 1914. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly entries written by the leading Gainsborough authority, Hugh Belsey.
The exhibition is free and open daily from Friday 24 January to Saturday 1 February, 2014 Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York. Monday to Saturday, 11–6; Sunday, January 26, 2–6; Tuesday, 28 and Thursday, 30 January, 11–8.
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Press release (15 August 2013) from Master Drawings New York:
Master Drawings New York
New York, 25 January — 1 February 2014
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In a fifteen block stretch of the Upper East Side’s ‘Gold Coast’ in New York, close to 30 of the most acclaimed international dealers in master drawings will show the latest artworks entering the market during the eighth edition of Master Drawings New York, January 25th through February 1, 2014 with a Preview Friday January 24th from 4 to 8pm. Timed to coincide with New York’s major January art-buying events, including the Old Master auctions and The Winter Antiques Show, Master Drawings New York includes top dealers from the US as well as the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Originally conceived as an annual walkthrough, Master Drawings New York has grown into a ‘must see’ event with a number of New York dealers making their galleries available to their overseas colleagues for the week. (more…)
Exhibition | Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum
From the Vatican Museums:
Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI
Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican Museums, Rome, 2 October 2013 — 4 January 2014
Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega
For the first time in over two hundred years, an exhibition will bring back to life in the Vatican the charm of the eighteenth-century collections of the Profane Museums at the time of Pius VI, before the Napoleonic requisitions. It offers a unique opportunity to see reunited, in their original museum context, works previously exhibited in the Museum and now conserved in prestigious international cultural institutions. The exhibition will open simultaneously with the new display of the historical collections of the Profane Museum.
The Profane Museum, the original nucleus of the collections of profane antiquities in the future complex of the Vatican Museums, was created by Clement XIII (Rezzonico, 1758–1769) and enriched with further collections and furnishings under Pius VI (Braschi, 1775–1799). The conclusion of this demanding restoration project, which involved the entire collection and its context, is an opportunity to imagine a momentary “homecoming” of a nucleus of antique gems and cameos, mounted in elaborate Neoclassical settings at the end of the eighteenth century, and a valuable numismatic collection of Greek, Etruscan and Roman exemplars. Involved in the dramatic wartime events of the Napoleonic period, these works were transported to France as a war indemnity following the assassination of General Mathurin-Léonard Duphot in Rome in 1798.
Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega, curator and assistant in the Department of Decorative Arts of the Vatican Museums, the exhibition Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI – presented in the evocative surroundings of the Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding – displays for the first time in over two hundred years works such as the Augustus Group, with its splendid portrait of the emperor in chalcedony, the famous Carpegna Cameo of magnificently engraved onyx depicting the Triumph of Bacchus, the “Delle Paste” Group, with a glass cameo pinax depicting the loves of Bacchus and Ariadne, and other Groups and cameos masterfully reinterpreted and infused with new life by Luigi Valadier, celebrated silversmith in Rome at the time of Pius VI. (more…)
New Book | The Reception of Titian in Britain from Reynolds to Ruskin
Papers from a 2011 conference have recently been published by Brepols:
Peter Humfrey, ed., The Reception of Titian in Britain from Reynolds to Ruskin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 258 pages, ISBN: 978-2503536750, 70€.
This volume comprises sixteen essays on the reception of Titian by British painters, collectors and critics in the long nineteenth century. The main focus falls on the first three decades of the century, in the aftermath of the exhibition of the celebrated Orléans collection in London in 1798–99. But the chronology extends from Reynolds and his contemporaries, around the time of the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, to the more diverse and complicated reactions of the Victorian age, and even into the twentieth century.
C O N T E N T S
• Peter Humfrey, Introduction: The Pre-History,
• Marin Postle, ‘That Titian of our times’: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the ‘Divine Titian’
• Jonathan Yarker, Copies and the Taste for Titian in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
• Stephen Lloyd, ‘So much is Titian the rage’: Titian, Copies and Artist-Collectors in London c.1790–1830
• Rosie Dias, Colour, Effect and the Formation of an English School of Painting
• Linda Borean, Sir Abraham Hume as Collector and Writer
• Philippa Simpson, Titian in Post-Orléans London
• Anne Lyles, Constable and Titian
• Tom Nichols, Hazlitt and Titian: Progress, Gusto and the (Dis)Pleasure of Painting
• Godfrey Evans, ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’: The Dukes of Hamilton and Titian
• Caroline Campbell, Titian in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
•William McKeown, Getting at ‘the mind of Titian’in Ruskin’s Modern Painters
• Jason Rosenfeld, Millais and the ‘luster of Titian’
• Jeremy Howard, Titian’s Rape of Europa: Its Reception in England and Sale to America
• Catherine Whistler, Merchants and Writers: The Ashmolean’s Titian Collection and Some Nineteenth-Century Owners
• Susanna Avery-Quash, Titian at the National Gallery, London: An Unchanging Reputation?
Exhibition | Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works
From The Met:
Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014
Curated by Fernando Mazzocca and Matteo Ceriana
Antonio Canova (1757–1822), the greatest of all neoclassical sculptors, remains famous above all for the elegant nude mythological subjects that he carved exquisitely in marble. But he also worked in a deeply serious, deceptively simple style. This less familiar Canova is revealed in an extraordinary series of full-scale plaster models illustrating episodes from the Old and New Testaments. Such models, used to review his compositions before they were transferred into stone, were a distinctive feature of his sculptural practice. These Biblical scenes were made in connection with a project for 32 low reliefs that were to adorn the Tempio Canoviano, the church in his home town Possagno, which later became the artist’s mausoleum. He completed only seven models before his death. Six come from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, and one from the Gipsoteca in Possagno. Newly restored, they will all be lent for the first time to the United States. Drawing inspiration from ancient sculpture and early Renaissance masters, the models are striking for the marked linearity of the figures, arranged in brilliantly syncopated compositions. They constitute Canova’s last, profoundly moving masterworks.
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From the Gallerie d’Italia:
Canova. L’ultimo capolavoro. Le metope del Tempio
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014
a cura di Fernando Mazzocca e Matteo Ceriana
L’esposizione è organizzata da Intesa Sanpaolo in partnership con la Soprintendenza Speciale PSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Venezia e dei Comuni della Gronda lagunare e in collaborazione con la Fondazione Cariplo. Aperta al pubblico nella sede milanese fino al 6 gennaio 2014, la mostra sarà ospitata al Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York dal 20 gennaio al 27 aprile 2014.
Il recente restauro di sei bassorilievi in gesso conservati presso le Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, ispirati a episodi dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento, e lo studio dei documenti ad essi relativi hanno portato alla luce opere di grande valore storico. Sono infatti state identificate nelle opere restaurate i modelli originali per le prime delle trentadue metope – i pannelli decorativi destinati a ritmare il fregio dorico – che Antonio Canova, moderno Fidia, intendeva realizzare per il pronao del Tempio della natia Possagno, l’edificio maestoso da lui stesso progettato ispirandosi all’architettura del Partenone e del Pantheon.
Lo scultore iniziò a lavorare ai modelli delle metope nel dicembre del 1821; ai primi di aprile del 1822 ne erano stati eseguiti sette, subito inviati dallo studio di Roma all’Accademia di Venezia, perché altrettanti scultori, scelti tra i migliori allievi dell’Accademia stessa, iniziassero a realizzarne la versione in marmo. La morte, sopraggiunta il 13 ottobre 1822, impedì allo scultore di portare a compimento il progetto. Insieme ai sei bassorilievi del Tempio, sono in mostra sette disegni preparatori, provenienti dal Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa, in stretta relazione alle metope stesse, che testimoniano il costante interesse di Canova per i temi biblici e cristiani, così come il suo studio dei Primitivi.
Completano l’esposizione due esemplari, provenienti dalla Biblioteca Braidense, dell’Atlante illustrato della Storia della scultura (1813–1818 e 1822–1824) di Leopoldo Cicognara, storico dell’arte e amico di Canova: una fonte importante che permette di contestualizzare meglio il confronto con il Medioevo e il primo Rinascimento. Uno dei sette modelli delle metope, andato purtroppo perduto, viene rappresentato in mostra dal bassorilievo proveniente dalla Gipsoteca Antonio Canova di Possagno, appartenente ad una serie eseguita dai seguaci dell’opera del Maestro.
La mostra trova una sede ideale nelle sale della sezione Da Canova a Boccioni delle Gallerie di Piazza Scala, nelle quali sono esposti i bassorilievi Rezzonico di Collezione Fondazione Cariplo. Tale collocazione consente un confronto diretto – nell’ambito delle opere di Canova con la tecnica del bassorilievo in gesso – tra la produzione giovanile dell’ultimo decennio del Settecento, ispirata all’antichità classica, e opere realizzate prima della morte.
New Book | Forbidden Fashions in Early Venetian Convents
From Texas Tech University Press:
Isabella Campagnol, Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents, Costume Society of America Series (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2013), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-0896728295, $35.
Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling—simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry—these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society. Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city’s social and economic history.
Isabella Campagnol, a dress, textile, and decorative arts historian, is the co-editor of Rubelli: A Story of Venetian Silk. She has
lectured on the topics of Venice and Venetian textiles in Italy and
Europe and the United States. She lives between Murano and Rome.
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Liza Foreman, “Fashion Inside Convent Walls,” provides a sketch of the project in The New York Times (23 September 2013) . . .
. . . Ms. Campagnol, 44, was commissioned by the society to write Forbidden Fashions after lecturing at its symposium in 2008. The book spans the period from the 15th century, when there were around 2,100 nuns living in the city’s 30 convents, to the mid-18th century, when, Ms. Campagnol said, “most of the convents were closed or repurposed by Napoleon, after the fall of the Republic in 1797.”
As for the fashionable nuns, they were “how Venice preserved its wealth” at a time when brides were expected to come with large dowries, the author explained. “If you had more than one daughter, one married and the rest went to convents.” . . .
The full article is available here»
New Book | At the King’s Table: Royal Dining through the Ages
While the eighteenth century doesn’t stand out in the book’s description (hard to compare with 48-day picnics), the Georgian period is covered, too. With feasting in mind for all of you celebrating this curious American holiday, all the best for a happy Thanksgiving. -CH
From the publisher:
Susanne Groom, At the King’s Table: Royal Dining through the Ages (London: Merrell, in association with Historic Royal Palaces, 2013), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1858946139, $40.
Here are the feasts that really are fit for a king – or queen. This delightful book explores the history of royal dining from the bustling kitchens of the Middle Ages to the informal dinner parties of today. Susanne Groom, a former curator at Historic Royal Palaces, considers the diets of monarchs from Richard II to Elizabeth II, revealing the exotic beasts served at medieval courts, the 48-day picnic prepared for Henry VIII and François I of France at the Field of Cloth of Gold, the romantic suppers made for Charles II and his mistresses, Queen Victoria’s love of nursery food, and the gluttonous appetite of Edward VII. We also learn about royal table manners, the earliest cookbooks, the hiring of flamboyant chefs and the intrigues of unscrupulous kitchen staff, the ever-changing health advice given to the sovereign, and the influence of royal diet on the average family fare. Full of lively anecdotes, colourful characters, rarely seen illustrations, and menus from state banquets, weddings, coronations and jubilees, At
the King’s Table is a treat for all culinary fans.
Susanne Groom is a consultant curator at Historic Royal
Palaces, London. She is the co-author of Kew Palace:
The Official Illustrated History (Merrell, 2006).
Reviewed | Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts
While the manuscripts included in this exhibition date from the Middle Ages, there is material pertinent to eighteenth-century collectors, as noted below. And to everyone celebrating Hanukkah (which, of course, most unusually coincides this year with the American Thanksgiving), a very happy holiday! -CH
From caa.reviews:
Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt, eds. Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures, exhibition catalogue (Oxford: Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2010), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1851243136, £25.
Exhibition schedule: Jewish Museum, New York, 14 September 2012 — 3 February 2013
Reviewed by Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb; posted 20 November 2013.
Illuminated manuscripts offer the best-surviving evidence of Jewish artistic production in the Middle Ages, bearing witness to the tastes of their Jewish patrons, the skills of Jewish scribes, and the aesthetic acuity of Jewish readers and viewers. Jews did not live in isolation, and the artists responsible for the decoration of their books—who were not necessarily Jewish but may have been—both drew from and contributed to the artistic conventions of the dominant culture. ‘Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries’, an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2012–13 and online via the Jewish museum website, provided an opportunity not only to see important, often beautiful examples of rarely shown Hebrew manuscripts, but also to explore the fascinating, complex intellectual and cultural relations between Jews and non-Jews of medieval Europe.
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
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From the exhibition website:
Jan Jiri Baltzer (1738–99), Posthumous Portrait of David Ben Abraham Oppenheimer, Chief Rabbi of Prague, 1773
Engraving after Johann Kleinhard, 7 3/4 x 4 3/8 in. (19.5 x 11.1 cm), The Jewish Museum, New York Gift of Dr. Harry G. Friedman, F 4143
The collection of Rabbi David Oppenheimer (1664–1736) is his most significant legacy. His more than 780 manuscripts and 4,200 printed books in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic form perhaps the most important private Jewish library ever assembled. For most of his life he was unable to enjoy this treasure, keeping the works at his father-in-law’s home in Hanover to avoid the censorship imposed on Hebrew texts in Prague. After his death, the collection was inherited by a succession of relatives. It was appraised by the Jewish luminary Moses Mendelssohn and ultimately acquired by the Bodleian in 1829.
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A recently discovered Passover Haggadah commissioned in 1726 by one of David Oppenheimer’s relatives sold, incidentally, last week (22 November 2013) for £210,000.
Exhibition | Giacomo Ceruti: On the Eve of the Enlightenment
Press release from Robilant-Voena:
Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767): Popolo e nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei lumi
Robilant-Voena, Milan, 30 October — 13 December 2013
Curated by Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti
Robilant-Voena presenta nella sua sede milanese una mostra che indaga uno dei più grandi artisti del Settecento italiano: Giacomo Ceruti. Nell’occasione sarà possibile apprezzare un cospicuo nucleo di opere di questo protagonista della “pittura della realtà” lombarda, riscoperto a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento per merito degli studi di Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Delogu, Giovanni Testori e Mina Gregori. Grazie ai prestiti di importanti collezioni private di formazione antica o recente, la mostra affiancherà a dipinti già noti da tempo, alcune tele finora sconosciute, che contribuiranno a mettere a fuoco i diversi aspetti del linguaggio di questo formidabile pittore.
Nato a Milano e precocemente trasferitosi a Brescia, Ceruti è infatti una personalità dal percorso articolato, che in una prima fase della sua carriera seppe imporsi come ritrattista dai vigorosi accenti realistici e soprattutto come attento indagatore della vita quotidiana delle classi sociali più disagiate. Molto spesso, infatti, le opere che l’artista realizza tra gli anni venti e i primi anni trenta del Settecento per la nobiltà bresciana hanno come protagonisti i cosiddetti pitocchi: mendicanti, vagabondi, filatrici, contadini e artigiani. Un mondo di emarginati e di umili lavoratori che, a differenza di quanto era avvenuto nella pittura dei decenni precedenti, Ceruti mette in scena senza ironia, conferendo anzi ai protagonisti una solenne dignità, cui contribuisce il formato monumentale dei dipinti. Questa propensione raggiunge i più alti risultati nel famoso ciclo di Padernello, la serie di tele pauperistiche che sancì la riscoperta dell’artista a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento.
Verso la metà degli anni trenta del Settecento Ceruti si sposta in terra veneta, lavorando tra Padova e Venezia dove ottenne importanti commissioni da uno dei più illustri collezionisti del tempo, il maresciallo Matthias von der Schulenburg. Il confronto con la cultura figurativa lagunare segna una cesura nel percorso di Ceruti, le cui conseguenze si faranno sentire per tutto il seguito della carriera dell’artista che, fatta eccezione per un soggiorno a Piacenza nel corso degli anni quaranta, si svolgerà in prevalenza a Milano, dove Ceruti morirà nel 1767.
In questa sua seconda stagione il pittore dimostra di privilegiare un linguaggio più elegante e raffinato, aggiornato sulle mode della coeva cultura figurativa europea. Così i suoi ritratti perdono la ruvida dimensione naturalistica degli anni giovanili per acquisire un tono mondano e internazionale, bene esemplificato in mostra dal Ritratto del Marchese Orsini a cavallo, proveniente dalla villa Orsini di Mombello di Imbersago. Lo stesso avviene per le scene di tema popolare, che sostituiscono ai toni drammatici degli esordi un registro più rasserenato, di cui è testimonianza l’idillio sentimentale rappresentato nell’Incontro al pozzo già parte della decorazione di palazzo Busseti a Tortona. Notevole è poi la serie di teste di carattere (Ritratto di fumatore in costume orientale; Vecchio con gatto; Vecchio con colbacco e cane) che fanno di Ceruti un grande interprete di quel genere pittorico mondano (e tipicamente settecentesco) molto amato a Venezia e in Francia. Questi trapassi stilistici lasciano comunque inalterato il dato saliente della poetica cerutiana, da riconoscere nella capacità di restituire le diverse realtà del proprio mondo con uno sguardo schietto e disincantato; una lucida razionalità di osservazione che rende Ceruti perfettamente in linea con la sensibilità dell’età dei lumi che si andava allora diffondendo in tutta Europa.
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Published by Skira, the catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:
Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767): Popolo e nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei lumi (Milan: Skira, 2013), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-8857222547, $75. Italian text with English insert.
Artista di spicco del Settecento italiano, Giacomo Ceruti detto “il Pitocchetto” è un importante protagonista della “pittura della realtà” lombarda, riscoperto a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento per merito degli studi di Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Delogu, Giovanni Testori e Mina Gregori. Questo catalogo, che accompagna l’esposizione milanese, ripercorre la carriera artistica di Ceruti, a partire dagli anni bresciani, spesi sul binario di una ricerca realista, fino agli anni veneti e milanesi, quando il suo linguaggio diventa internazionale, e i pitocchi lasciano spazio ai ritratti nobiliari e alle teste di fantasia. Attraverso ventiquattro opere provenienti da prestigiose collezioni private oltre che dal patrimonio della galleria (alcune delle quali completamente sconosciute al pubblico e riscoperte in occasione della mostra), si vuole indagare questa dicotomia dell’opera di Ceruti, dove la realtà declinata nei suoi aspetti più poveri, fatta di storpi e mendicanti, stracci e polvere, si contrappone a un’eleganza di gusto internazionale, nella quale trionfano velluti e marsine.
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