Giorgione And Savoldo

Rinascimento was intended to be a ‘three-episode exhibition’ and at the same time a pilot project for a more comprehensive cultural programme centred on Brescia's artistic heritage and that of its art gallery: a project that could lead up to the Tosio Martinengo Gallery's reopening, and present to the public the research undertaken for the preparation of the general catalogue of its paintings. This onerous work, which involved conservation treatment, photographic recording and whatever else was necessary for the complete description of every single picture in the collection. The first volume, dealing with 17th and 18th century paintings, has already been published, and the second, with works from the 13th to 16th centuries, will soon follow. In order to present the results of this activity, the Rinascimento cycle will be accompanied by Art Unveiled, an exhibition dealing with a selection of works which have been revealed as particularly interesting by recent studies and restoration.

Rinascimento, on the other hand, consists of three study-exhibitions which, starting with this first on Giorgione and Savoldo,

show several paintings from the Tosio Martinengo Gallery next to masterpieces lent by important museums in Italy and abroad, and present for each the research conducted and discoveries made in the fields of iconography, attribution, philology and collection history. The project was designed as a unified whole, as an attempt to construct an articulated – and, we hope, not entirely anticipated – critical historical discourse on the Italian Renaissance: from the Po Plain-Veneto area with Giorgione and Savoldo, to the Florence of Fra Bartolomeo and the San Marco school, and the emergence of the young Raphael with his first work, the altarpiece of San Nicola da Tolentino.

The objective is to move on from the solid and reliable base provided by the research to communicate with as wide an audience as possible, so that the results of this study do not remain confined to the halls of academia. This exposition is accompanied, moreover, by a series of special events, with meetings, performances, an art-history course open to all, and guided visits to sites, works and monuments – at times little known – in the city of Brescia, based on itineraries tied to the themes dealt with in the exhibitions.

For this inaugural exhibition three masterpieces were chosen, linked by subtle harmonies and references, which lead us to Venice in the early decades of the sixteenth century, devoted to the literary vogue for Petrarch and endless conversations about love, its essence and the effects it produced: refined debates that inspired the writing of treatises and dialogues (such as Pietro Bembo's Asolani), or simply literary and musical entertainments, during which poetry was recited and compositions for voice and instrumental accompaniment performed. It is possible that Giorgione, mentioned by Vasari as a talented lute player, during the gatherings of nobles in that illustrious Venice executed such pieces, which often spoke of a young man’s longing for a distant or indifferent woman and the pitiful lethargy produced by such unreciprocated emotions. These same themes, translated into iconography, are to be found in a famous painting attributed to him, a double portrait dating to about 1502.

The subject recurs, in similar form and likewise interwoven with musical accompaniment, in the work of another artist who worked in Venice, but twenty years later, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, who was definitely influenced by Giorgione. Dated to circa 1525, his Young Man with Flute, which – and this one of the discoveries presented in this small study-exhibition – was found to have belonged in the seventeenth century to Cardinal Richelieu, is related to the fashion for the allegorical portrait of a musical theme. It should be remembered that both the flute and the lute played by Giorgione are instruments associated with Venus, and thus very appropriate to the 'sentimental lyricism' of this genre of painting.