Renaissance Bergamo and Brescia
The Renaissance of Bergamo and Brescia is one of the main declinations of Renaissance art in Italy. The importance of the two cities on the art scene expanded only from the sixteenth century, when foreign and local artists gave rise to an original synthesis of the Lombard and Venetian ways, thanks to the particular geographical position of the two cities: the last outpost of the Serenissima in mainland for Bergamo and territory disputed between Milan (and its rulers) and Venice for Brescia.
The Bergamo and Brescian masters were the origin of a “third way” of the mature Renaissance, after the Roman-Florentine and the Venetian, which was of fundamental importance as the basis of subsequent developments in the revolutionary language of Caravaggio, originating precisely in those areas.
Origins
Bergamo and Brescia recorded in the fifteenth century an importance in the Italian art scene that can be defined as “satellite” compared to the dominated centers such as Milan and Venice. For example, it was thanks to Francesco Sforza who worked in Bergamo Filarete (in the Duomo, about 1455) and also a masterpiece such as the Colleoni Chapel of Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1470-1476) is unthinkable outside the context of Sforza’s patrons of the period, such as Milan Cathedral and, above all, the Certosa di Pavia, from which resumed the Renaissance ideas covered by an exuberant decoration.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Brescia represented an island with respect to the leonardism and bramantism prevailing in Milan, so much so that it was chosen as a refuge by a Lombard artist of the “first generation” of the Renaissance, such as Vincenzo Foppa.
The fundamental stages of the local Renaissance were concentrated in the second and third decade of the sixteenth century: the meeting between Romanino and Titian in Padua in 1511, the arrival of Lorenzo Lotto in Bergamo in 1513, the transfer of Savoldo to Venice around 1520 and the the arrival of the Polyptych Averoldi by Titian in Brescia in 1522.
Lotto in Bergamo
A qualitative leap then took place in Bergamo when Giovanni Cariani, born in Bergamo but residing in Venice, settled there (from 1517) and above all Lorenzo Lotto. The latter arrived in 1513 to paint the great altarpiece, Martinengo for the church of St. Stephen. The provincial environment allowed him to move freely according to the inclinations of his own style, without adapting himself to the magniloquent ways of the ” Modern Manner ” of the Roman Renaissance, in the same way as he had given some somewhat awkward trials in the Marche. In Bergamo, supported by a cultured and wealthy clientele, he was able to gather the most congenial ferments, freeing himself from the dominant language in the most important centers of the peninsula. To his never forgotten Venetian root could add insights from Gaudenzio Ferrari, from the young Correggio, from Nordic art and from the local Lombard matrix.
Already the Pala Martinengo (1513-1516) showed some unscrupulous innovations, such as the arrangement of the throne of Mary and the saints with behind a nave of a church (and not an apse as typical), as the dome open to the sky (Mantegna quote) and the intense characterization of the characters and the vibrant light, which generate an effect of instability of the scene.
The next San Bernardino Altarpiece (1521) shows a very bright palette, a modern treatment of the shadows and a dizzying glimpse of the angels, in addition to the sense of perception of the presence of the viewer by Mary and especially of the angel at the foot of the throne., which interrupts the writing turning around surprised.
In addition to the cycles of frescoes full of iconographic novelties, such as that of the Suardi Oratory in Trescore Balneario, and in addition to intense and immediate portraits, it was above all the ambitious project of the inlaid chorus of Santa Maria Maggiore to keep it occupied until its departure in 1526. A dispute over the payment with the friars kept him away from the city, where he never returned despite having spent the happiest and most fruitful moment of his career.
The Renaissance in Brescia
The dawns
The very first, vague references to a new decorative and compositional taste that surpassed the international gothic style were found, in the pictorial field, in some works “descended from above” in the fifteenth-century medieval Brescia, above all the polyptych of Sant’Orsola by Antonio Vivarini for the church of San Pietro in Oliveto. The work had notable influences on local art, for example in the evolution of the art of Paul from Caylina the Elder towards more full forms, as in the Madonna and Child between Saints Lorenzo and Agostino which, performed after the arrival of the Vivarini polyptych,.
Another proto-Renaissance work, overwhelmingly “descended from above” in fifteenth-century Brescia was the Annunciation by Jacopo Bellini performed for the church of Sant’Alessandro, faithful to the language of the international Gothic but with relative novelties in spatial conception and in the attitude of the figures.
Other movements in this sense are detectable in sporadic works produced by local culture in the second half of the century, such as the great table of San Giorgio and the princess attributed to Antonio Cicognara or a similar master, where the aristocratic Gothic styles imported to Brescia from Gentile da Fabriano in the chapel of San Giorgio al Broletto, lost, evolve towards new spatial and luministic doses, properly Renaissance.
Vincenzo Foppa
The first, true Renaissance author of the Brescia scene, but of the rest of the entire Lombard context, was Vincenzo Foppa, who worked steadily in the city only after he was definitively transferred, in 1489, until his death in 1515.
The works created in this short period, not all of which have come down to us, demonstrate a general reworking of his artistic language in the light of the ever more pressing Renaissance novelties, deduced in the first place from Leonardo da Vinci’s lesson, while remaining faithful to its characteristic climate “archaic”. We find therefore the Mercanzia Altarpiece, conceived in a iron will of linear and luminous absoluteness: the consequent trepid but rarefied reality will constitute a capital lesson for Moretto. From the same period is the probable polyptych from which comes the Nativity of Jesus of Chiesanuova, performed precisely in this spirit of reworking. In the Stendardo of Orzinuovi, extreme work painted by Foppa almost ninety years old, humanity and nature are defined in a severe and monumental language, while the various figures are loaded with an expressive intensity imbued with physicality: even this true “pictorial testament” will constitute a solid starting point for Moretto is a clear reference for Savoldo, at that time already operating.
Certainly noteworthy is the fact that, on his return to Brescia, the Foppa obtained, as a final recognition of the City General Council, the assignment of a regular course of art to educate local young people, behind an annual salary of 100 lire.
The “intermediate generation”
Vincenzo Foppa and Moretto are the two cornerstones of Brescia’s Renaissance painting and it will end up becoming the biggest exponent of the local school. To fully understand the development of Brescian Renaissance art, however, it is not possible to overlook what is usually called the “intermediate generation”, ie a series of painters who worked between the end of the fifteenth and the first three decades of the sixteenth century (exactly between Foppa and the maturity of Moretto), producing a series of works of high artistic value developed within a local culture mainly influenced by Foppa, a climate that will not be foreign to the formation and subsequent affirmation of the great masters.
Floriano Ferramola
Floriano Ferramola (circa 1480-1528) was formed in the late fifteenth-century Brescia fed by the art of Foppa and by the latter’s elaborations, including those of Vincenzo Civerchio, generating a vast production especially in the second and third decade of the sixteenth century. More influenced by local movements than by the cultured art of Foppa, his style is linked to Umbrian-Emilian painting penetrated in eastern Lombardy through Perugino and Lorenzo Costa. Ferramola’s works will always be kept in modest tones but as a romantic, effective narrator.
It was the art of Ferramola that attracted the overwhelming majority of Brescia’s civil and religious patronage of the early sixteenth century: its famous Stories of Saints found their greatest success in various monasteries of the city and the territory, for example in Santa Giulia, San Giuseppe, Santa Croce, Santa Maria del Carmine (in collaboration with Civerchio), and then again in Lovere, Bedizzole, Nave, Bovezzo and Quinzano d’Oglio, creating a real school and influencing almost all the painters of the province: most of the early sixteenth century frescoes that have come down to us in the churches of the entire territory of Brescia can be added to its language. Other interventions involved the palaces of the nobility of the time, especially in the city: the cycle of the Palazzo Calini hall, now lost between Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery and Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, is one of the finest productions of profane painting of Lombardy in the early sixteenth century.
The narrative serenity of which Ferramola became a master, as well as his cursive language, the chromatic dosages, the varied and delicate naturalistic, landscape, environment and customs notions had substantial repercussions on Moretto, which reached artistic maturity during the period of greater productive fervor of Ferramola (1520-30).
Vincenzo Civerchio
Originally from Crema, Vincenzo Civerchio (1468 / 70-1544) worked mainly in Brescia from the late fifteenth century. In this period he produced a considerable number of works, some lost (like the frescoes in the old Duomo’s choir) and other ones that have survived to us, such as the Deposition in the church of Sant’Alessandro and part of a decorative cycle in the chapel of the Virgin for the already mentioned church of Santa Maria del Carmine, realized in collaboration with Ferramola.
Ranked first in the production of the painter, however, it places the altarpiece of St. Nicholas of Tolentino for the church of San Barnaba, signed and dated 1495, a work of the highest quality where Civerchio reveals a wide composite culture derived from the lessons of Bergognone and by Bernardino Butinone, connected to an effective pictorial technique and to an accurate expressive realism of the characters.
Paolo da Caylina the Younger
Also Paolo da Caylina the Younger (about 1485-1545) was formed in the Brescia proto renaissance of Foppa and Civerchio, then growing in the footsteps of Ferramola, with whom he often found himself collaborating, up to being called in the monastery of Santa Giulia to complete the frescoes in the choir of the nuns.
Similarly to the latter, the Caylina was also a great success in the patrimony of the time, creating around itself a school of painters similar to him. His production, however, quickly received strong influences from the great local masters, especially from Moretto and Romanino, being practically contemporary to them. Already in works of the beginning of the century, however, for example in the Adoration of the Cross with the Saints Constantine, Helen and Silvestro for the church of Santa Croce, one can find the compositional schemes and expressive attitudes that such masters, in particular the Moretto, they will repeat in the first productions and then evolve towards more mature models.
Obvious transitional characters can also be found in the two panels with the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi in the polyptych of the Madonna della Misericordia of the church of Sant’Agata (around 1520), where the typically fifteenth-century forms combine a broad and deep spatiality, a softness of the mixtures and a chromatic richness of warm and luminous tones borrowed from the first production of Romanino and Moretto and from the new Venetian influences brought to local art by these authors.
The masters of the full Renaissance
The disastrous sack of Brescia in 1512 put the city on its knees. The Serenissima intervened even more drastically, operating the so-called “esplanade”, ie the destruction of any building within a mile and a half from the walls, in order to eliminate any shelter or hiding place for the attackers. The lost real estate was innumerable and different cenobi, destroyed the original seat, they were forced to repair in the city, building new churches and monasteries within the walls.
The general economic damage, superimposed on the already costly reconstructions to be carried out after the sack, the Republic of Venice responded by offering reductions and sometimes tax exemptions, so as to be able to restore and rebuild the churches, convents and monasteries looted or completely destroyed with the esplanade. In that period a lively artistic commission was born, which favored the emergence of local personalities. From around 1520 (the esplanade was operated between 1516 and 1517) we have the affirmation of a group of almost contemporary painters who, by fusing the Lombard and Venetian cultural roots, developed very original results in the artistic panorama of the peninsula: the Romanino, Moretto and Savoldo.
In providential coincidence we have, in 1522, the arrival in Brescia of the Polyptych Averoldi of Titian for the presbytery of the collegiate of Saints Nazaro and Celso, who will know a very wide, immediate fortune among the local artistic exponents and will constitute a fundamental reference point in execution of a whole series of new works of art.
Romanino
Gerolamo Romani, known as Romanino, made his debut around 1510 with a Compianto in the Gallerie dell’Accademia of Venice, where a base of Lombard realism added references from other schools, such as that of Ferrara. In Padua he then saw the frescoes by Titian in the Scuola del Santo, from which he resumed a more accentuated sense for the full-bodied color and the dynamism of the composition. A first tribute to the Venetian master was found in the Santa Giustina Altarpiece (Civic Museums of Padua, 1513), in which also recollections of Lombard formation like architectureBramante of the vault that overhangs and frames the figures.
Returned to his homeland, around 1517 Romanino re-proposed a similar scheme in the Madonna and Child with saints for the local church of San Francesco, in which the physical types that distinguished his subsequent production are already found. Without going too far from Brescia in the following years he touched various sites, such as the Duomo of Cremona (Passion of Christ, about 1520), where he came into contact with the magniloquent ways of Pordenone, and like the small towns of the Brescia valleys (Breno, Bienno, Pisogne), in which he left tables and frescoes with interesting accents to everyday reality, strongly present in gestures, costumes and expressions.
In 1521 the cooperation with Moretto at the Chapel of the Sacrament in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista sanctioned the presence in the city of a real school. The most successful of the latter, led Romanino to focus mainly on the province, more receptive of its naturalistic style, allowing himself some refined digression as the frescoes in the castle of Buonconsiglio in Trento after 1530, alongside Dosso Dossi.
Moretto
Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto, worked mainly in Brescia, so his style is more rooted in the local tradition, with a more decisive influence of Vincenzo Foppa. He often worked for churches and local private clients, becoming the most sought-after painter in the city. Among the earliest works stands out the Elijah and the angel for the Chapel of the Sacrament in St. John (1521-1523), from the background to the Flemish.
In the following years he was influenced by Tiziano, thanks to the arrival of the aforementioned Polyptych Averoldi in 1522, and by Raphael (seen in the prints by Marcantonio Raimondi), arriving at softer and more composed ways: it is no coincidence that works like the Saint Giustina di Padova and a donor (around 1530) were in the past attributed to Sanzio.
Lively portraitist, praised by Vasari, in his works we can catch echoes of Lorenzo Lotto and Hans Holbein the Younger. From the forties he became one of the most appreciated performers of counter-reformed instances, with altarpieces often dedicated to the theme of the Eucharistic sacrifice, such as Christ and the Angel (1550-1554), a late masterpiece set to a muted palette, to pathetic sentiments and to a prospective agility, with the figure of Christ wisely articulated along the steps.
Savoldo
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo was the third master from Brescia and his production is located entirely in two decades, from about 1520 to 1540. Youth works are not known and this makes it difficult to reconstruct his training. In 1506 it is known that it was in Parma and in 1508 in Florence, when the city was in ferment for the presence of the extraordinary novelties of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raffaello. By 1520 he settled in Venice, where he came into contact with the material effects of the full-bodied color of Titian and with the contemplative atmosphere of Giorgione, while still remaining faithful to its Lombard naturalistic matrix.
In particular, his works are famous with a throbbing light, such as the series of Maddalena (around 1540), or San Matteo and the angel at the Metropolitan Museum (1534). The latter shows a nocturnal setting with a light source inside the painting (the candle in the foreground) and very suggestive chiaroscuro effects, which anticipate caravaggism.
Among the numerous portraits stands the Portrait of a man in armor at the Louvre (about 1529), where the subject is portrayed in glimpse and reflected by two mirrors, a true pictorial tour de force linked to disquisitions on the comparison of the arts. If in the large-format altarpieces the artist showed to adhere to the traditional schemes, open to the influences of Titian, the medium-sized works, intended for individuals, in which he experiments more original solutions, drawing on a vast repertoire, which also reaches Hieronymus Bosch.
Renaissance sculpture in Brescia
The important declination of Renaissance sculpture developed in Brescia from around the 1460s, in the context of Venetian Renaissance culture, had its peak between the end of the century and the beginning of the next, a period in which a series of public and private building sites that were able to produce absolutely original works, ranging from the refined and experimental sculptural matrix of the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to the regular classicism of the Palazzo della Loggia.
The protagonist of this fortunate and brief parable, cut short in 1512 with the invasion of the French and the subsequent sack of Brescia, was Gasparo Cairano, acknowledged author of works of the highest artistic level such as the ark of St. Apollonio, the Adoration Caprioli, the Martinengo mausoleum and, in the first place, the cycle of the Caesars for the facades of the Palazzo della Loggia, praised in print as early as 1504 by the De sculptura by Pomponio Gaurico. Contemporaries to the Cairano were other authors more or less Brescia, often present in Brescia only for brief chapters of their career, such as the Tamagnino and the workshop of Sanmicheli, together with other minor artists placed in the circle of the master, for example Antonio Mangiacavalli and Ambrogio Mazzola, while the galaxy of Venetian sculptors active in the city during the entire second half of the 15th century still remains largely anonymous.
Moroni, between Bergamo and Brescia
In the second half of the century the figure of Giovan Battista Moroni stood out in the orobico-Brescia area. Originally from Bergamo, he trained in Brescia with Moretto, before returning to his hometown. He was the author of altarpieces faithful to the principles of the Counter-Reformation, but he excelled above all as a portraitist able to create works of intense psychological connotation, treated with an excellent technique.
Source from Wikipedia