The Bolognese School or the Bologna painting flourished in Bologna, the capital of Emilia Romagna, between the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, and rivalled Florence and Rome as the center of painting. Certain artistic conventions, which over time became traditionalist, had been developed in Rome during the first decades of the 16th century. As time passed, some artists sought new approaches to their work that no longer reflected only the Roman manner.
Its most important representatives include the Carracci family, including Ludovico Carracci and his two cousins, the brothers Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Later, it included other prominent Baroque painters: Domenichino and Lanfranco, active mostly in Rome, eventually Guercino and Guido Reni, and Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna, which was run by Lodovico Carracci.
The Carracci studio sought innovation or invention, seeking new ways to break away from traditional modes of painting while continuing to look for inspiration from their literary contemporaries; the studio formulated a style that was distinguished from the recognized manners of art in their time. This style was seen as both systematic and imitative, borrowing particular motifs from the past Roman schools of art and innovating a modernistic approach.
The period of greatest flowering and relevance at international level is generally considered to be between the 16th and 17th centuries, the period of the activity of the Carraccis and their pupils and disciples, mainly concentrated between Bologna and Rome.
Like Vasari for Tuscan painting, Bologna can also boast an illustrious local historian and biographer: the count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, author of the work Felsina painter, published in Bologna in 1678.
History
The Accademia del Naturale —also known as Accademia del Disegno— was formed in the Carracci workshop, which sought to renew the art of the moment, predominantly mannerist, a style they considered decadent. Bologna at that time was not only the second city of the Papal States but also a city with a thriving bourgeoisie, which exercised an active artistic patronage, at the same time that its university, one of the most renowned in Europe, conferred on it an important intellectual influence, all of which created a high-level cultural environment and made it a prominent center of humanism.
Origin
The factors that have long made it difficult to delineate, for this century, a local pictorial school with peculiar characteristics, are identified by Longhi in the destruction of many of the pictorial cycles dating back to this era, as well as in the heavy counterfeiting of the works themselves carried out above all starting from the seventeenth century, driven by the desire to ennoble minor works with high-sounding names.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, two important works of the Florentine school were present in Bologna: the Maestà di Santa Maria dei Servi, attributed to Cimabue or his workshop and datable around 1280, and the Polyptych by Giotto, datable around the 1930s of the century, and now preserved in the local National Art Gallery. Despite the recognized greatness of these artists, Roberto Longhi denies the dependence of Bolognese painting of the fourteenth century on that of Tuscany, and, indeed, identifies multiple influences capable of creating a local “figurative spirit”: Romanesque Emilian sculpture, Byzantine-inspired painting of Venice, thecourtesy of Simone Martini in Avignon. The scholar identifies the language of Bolognese painting of the fourteenth century, in the “supremely icastic asymptomatic, directly expressive, sometimes even expressionistic” attitude.
The main interpreter of this language is identified in Vitale da Bologna, a painter active in the first half of the fourteenth century, between Bologna, Pomposa, where he worked on the frescoes at the Abbey, and Udine, where he performed a cycle of frescoes at the Duomo. Roberto Longhi underlines the importance of Vitale as progenitor for the Bolognese school, comparing the role to that played by Giotto for the Florentine one or by Duccio for the Sienese one.
Among the most significant works by Vitale, we note, in addition to the aforementioned cycles, the frescoes originally executed at the church of Sant’Apollonia di Mezzaratta and, since 1963 – following the detachment for conservative reasons -, exhibited at the National Art Gallery. This cycle of frescoes – carried out, with the participation of several artists, from the mid- fourteenth to the fifteenth century, is the most important cycle of frescoes of the Gothic period in Bologna. In addition to the aforementioned frescoes, Vitale’s catalog includes several panels including the Madonna dei dente of Palazzo Davia-Bargellini, the Madonna dei Battuti of the Vatican Pinacoteca, and the San Giorgio and the dragon of the Pinacoteca Nazionale.
Another important figure is Simone di Filippo known as dei Crocifissi – nickname attributed by Malvasia for the large production of images of the dying Christ left by him -, author of the Polyptych by San Domenico of the National Pinacoteca and series of crucifixes distributed in many of the he asked of Bologna.
Worthy of mention also Jacopo Avanzi – also active in the church of Mezzaratta -, Dalmasio Scannabecchi – author with whom the figure of a Pseudo-Dalmasio very active in Tuscany, between Pistoia and Florence is often associated -, and the Pseudo Jacopino, name, the latter, to which works of different workmanship are attributed, including some even prior to the work of Vitale.
Development
Its gestation was influenced by the publication in 1582 of a theological essay by the then Archbishop of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti, entitled Discourse on sacred and profane images (Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane). Paleotti, following the guidelines set by the counter-reformist Church, was looking for a religious art with a clearer and more direct visual language, urging artists to seek a figuration with a simple concept and an intimate expression of beauty, founded on the imitation of truth and that it was easy for the people to understand.
The Acracdemia de los Carracci sought to capture the theories of Paleotti in a specific pictorial style, being one of the founders of the classicist current, which was widely disseminated in Italy and also in France. Within the Accademia, Ludovico assumed managerial and organizational functions, Agostino was in charge of perspective, architecture and anatomy classes, and Annibale designed and painted. Francisco de Goya put in an Opinion on the Study of the Arts(1792) to Annibale as a model of painting teacher, since “he allowed each one to run where his spirit inclined him, without specifying any one to follow his style or method”.
The Academy emphasized both pictorial and intellectual training, and left a lot of freedom to its students, who were considered artists with creative capacity and full artistic autonomy; they were free to interpret the themes each in their own style, to resort to tradition or to innovate. His study was based on the daily exercise of design, practicing any aspect of reality, from the noblest subject to the humblest object. According to Malvasia, “they ate and at the same time drew: bread in one hand, pencil or charcoal in the other.” With the motto Contentione perfectus (“perfection through effort”), the Academy taught, in addition to artistic teachings, lessons in literature, philosophyand other humanistic disciplines, to train the artist both in his trade and in the scholarship necessary for the intellectual elaboration of his works. Likewise, debates and conferences given by experts of all modalities, from the poet Giambattista Marino to the anatomist Giuseppe Lanzoni, were frequent in the Academy.
The Bolognese school took its references from classical styles from both Greco-Roman antiquity and the Renaissance of the first Cinquecento, especially Rafael. They were also inspired by artists such as Correggio and Venetian painting from the 16th century. Thus, in 1665, Gian Lorenzo Bernini affirmed that Annibale Carracci had “brought together all the good: Rafael’s graceful lines, Michelangelo’s basic anatomy, Correggio’s delicate technique, Titian’s coloring and Giulio Romano’s fantasy and Mantegna ».
His style was based on the study of natural reality (naturale vero), which ran in parallel to the naturalism of Caravaggio, albeit in a form aesthetic and idealized, rather than the harsh realism of the artist Milan. For Bolognese artists the end of painting is the truth, but just as for Caravaggio this truth must be described directly and crudely, for the classicists it must be sifted by the veil of reason, through the filter of history, which is the one that lays the foundations of artistic correction. On the other hand, the study of reality even leads to the description of vulgar genres, of the ugly (brutto), the humble, the popular, the grotesque, the comic, as perceived in his ritratti carichi (“loaded portraits”), in which the physiognomy of the characters is deformed or exaggerated – one of the origins of caricature as artistic genre.
Bolognese classicism was a major success in papal Rome, and they received numerous commissions from cardinals and members of the Roman nobility. The Incamminati had a wide mastery of the fresco technique, so they were in charge of decorating both churches and palaces in the papal capital. They used to work together: for example, in the decoration of the Palazzo Farnese they collaborated with Annibale Carracci Francesco Albani, Domenichino, Giovanni Lanfranco and Sisto Badalocchio.
Trade shows on Bolognese painting
Important for the rediscovery of Bolognese painting, were a series of exhibitions organized between 1954 and 1970, on the occasion of the editions of the Biennale of ancient art promoted by the Superintendency in order to discover and re-evaluate the role of Bolognese art.
The first exhibition in the series was that of 1954 on Guido Reni, conceived and curated by Cesare Gnudi and set up by the architect Leone Pancaldi at the Archiginnasio in Bologna. This was followed by the one on the Carracci of 1956, the one on the Masters of painting in the seventeenth century in Emilia in 1959 and the one on the Guercino in 1968.
Particularly important, for the summary character, the exhibition Da Cimabue a Morandi, organized in 2015 at the Palazzo Fava in Bologna and curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.