Edited essay by Jörg Zutter

The exhibition The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art comprises close to one 110 masterworks, mostly paintings on canvas and some panel paintings, drawings and sculptures, which will be on display at the National Gallery of Australia for the first time. The exhibition gives an original and well-balanced overview of the evolution of art on the peninsula from about 1500 until 1800. This introduction focuses on three of the most famous artists, each representing a century, a style and a cultural centre in the history of Italian art. Andrea del Sarto represents the 16th century in Florence and in particular the Mannerism; Gianlorenzo Bernini the 17th century, the period of the Baroque art in Rome; and, last but not least, Giambattista Tiepolo the 18th century in Venice, the time when the styles of Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism overlap.

Although the earliest works in the exhibition are by famous artists like Michelangelo, Leonoardo da Vinci and Raphael, and mark the moment when the High Renaissance was at its peak, the real beginning of the show lies within the period immediately afterwards known as Mannerism and includes artists who reached maturity after 1520 in Florence: Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Agnolo Bronzino. The art world has given a lot of attention to Mannerism, and in recent years various exhibitions and research projects have explored the formal and theoretical aspects of it. A number of scholars have described the works of these artists as fashionable, contemporary, and even visionary, whereas other experts emphasise the intellectual, artificial and mannered outlook and the curved movement in these compositions. But for most of them it is clear that Mannerism did not evolve as a reaction against High Renaissance but as a logical extension of it.

Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) was the most important painter working in Florence when Raphael and Michelangelo were active in Rome. He was a master of tone, color and dynamic composition and the teacher of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Giorgio Vasari and other Mannerists. Madonna and Child (private collection London) is an excellent example of the early stage of Mannerism. The composition and the colors may be summarised in a contemporary vocabulary as sophisticated, vibrant, and highly communicative. Andrea d'Agnolo di Francesco was the son of a Florentine tailor, hence his cognomen 'del Sarto'. According to the famous biographer of artists and painter Giorgio Vasari, who was Andrea's pupil, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith, but showed such promise as a draughtsman that he soon transferred to the shop of the painter Gian Barile and thereafter to that of Piero di Cosimo. After he returned to Florence in around 1511 from a stay in Rome, where he had been impressed by artists of the High Renaissance like Raphael, Andrea del Sarto was established as one of the most famous and sought after masters of the maniera moderna and as one of the most vigorous and articulate artists of Reformed Catholic culture. At about 1515 he was beginning to formulate his mature style, emphasising aggressively modelled, strong forms and using a highly keyed palette.

The Madonna and Child is painted on thick poplar panel. The Virgin stands behind a stone parapet or ledge, holding a book in her right hand and supporting with the other the Infant Christ, who stands in perfect contraposto, derived from the classical Renaissance composition. On the other hand, the Child gestures downward and looks off to the right; his tousled hair and impish grin are in strong contrast to his mother's serene bearing. In some areas of the composition an underdrawing has become slightly visible. Del Sarto was indeed renowned in his own day for his skill as a draughtsman and he was one of the foremost proponents of the Florentine artistic ideal of disegno, an expression that refers to the tradition of drawing as the first and most important step in the process of composition and painting in Mannerism.

Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), active in Rome his whole life, was one of the greatest sculptor-architects of the 17th century, the genius of Italian Baroque! International scholars (in music, literature, and art history) use the term Baroque for a time frame ranging from 1600-1720. In 1600 Rome became the center of the Baroque by attracting artists from other regions and Northern Europe to create challenging new works. The papacy patronised art on a large scale, with the intention to make Rome not only a new artistic center but also the most beautiful city of the Christian world, for the greater glory of God and the Catholic Church. Bernini's immediate predecessors were gifted painters mainly from Northern Italy. The most famous of them was named after his birthplace, Caravaggio near Milan. Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, who came from Bologna, together with a whole group of decorative artists set into action the renaissance of ceiling frescos in Italy (among them were Guido Reni and Pietro da Cortona). From about 1625 on, the commissions of successive popes meant Bernini controlled most aspects of the artistic production during this period in the Eternal City. For the visitor to Rome today, Bernini's work is omnipresent - in the design of the encircling colonnaded piazza in front of St Peter's, in a group of wonderful churches, in a sequence of world-famous fountains, in the fantastic interior of St Peter's, and in a number of expressive portrait busts, mythological and religious sculptures like the Bust of Clement X, The Ecstasy of St Teresa, David, and Apollo and Daphne, among others. As a sculptor of unrivalled technical perfection and dramatic energy, he produced a host of exhilarating works that seem to breathe with life, and as an architect he became a kind of an artistic director (anticipating Frederico Fellini) who transformed parts of Rome into powerful and vivid architecture with scenographic daring. Bernini's talent found its most striking expression in projects in which he combined sculpture, painting and architecture. A letter written by Fulvio Testi to Count Francesco Fontana on 29 January 1633 reveals the artist's magic radiation and social power, he was both a highly respected intellectual and star of the society of his time: 'Cavaliere Bernini, that very famous sculptor who made the statue of the Pope and the Daphne that is in the vineyard of the Borghese, who is the Michelangelo of our century . . . He has become enamoured of me and I of him, and he is truly a man who drives people crazy, because he knows a great deal about belles-lettres and he has witticisms and sharpness that touch the soul.' Bernini served a succession of popes as well as the French King Louis XIV for whom he executed a monumental equestrian statue between 1669 and 1677.

No more than 40 years after Bernini's death in 1680, the idea of Baroque spectacle had almost disappeared from the artistic scene in Rome; and Rome played a smaller role in the international cultural stage and focused more and more on past glories. The 18th century was a century where different artistic centers competed with each other at the same time and where various styles Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism were practised both simultaneously and subsequently by various artists (Giovanni Panini, Antonio Joli, Sebastino and Marco Ricci, Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Pietro Longhi, and Antonio Canova) in Rome, Naples, and Venice.

Gimbattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the most celebrated painter of the 18th century in Italy and spent most of his professional life in Venice, with trips to southern Germany and Spain. His paintings and frescos of mostly mythological and religious subjects reveal his great talent as an artist who had a sensitive appreciation of his patrons' requirements. He enjoyed patronage among the aristocracy in Venice, the Veneto and Lombardia regions. Abroad he glorified many illustrious customers from Würzburg to Madrid, where his patron was Charles III. Tiepolo had a gift to combine narrative and devotional subject matters with theatrical force. He painted dramatic religious images on ceilings as if it were on stage (the Virgin, the sufferings of the saints, miracles and various scenes from the Old and New Testaments) for confraternities, churches, religious orders, and private citizens. There are many ways of understanding his work. From a historical perspective, for example, in close relationship with 18th century Baroque opera (Antonio Vivaldi) and theatre (Carlo Goldoni) and critical debates on drama presentations on stage. It can also be understood by reference to its visual sources in the first place to the 16th century, to the work of Veronese. For us today, Tiepolo is the first and foremost painter of the ceilings. Like a trapeze artist in a circus, his kingdom is the boundless airspace of an imaginative world. Time Uncovering Truth from the Museo Civico in Vicenza was painted for the artist's great patron Carlo Cordellina and came to the museum from the impressive palace that he built on the Contra' Riale in Vicenza. The oval ceiling painting with regard to the careful structured composition, and the brilliance of the brushwork is of high artistic quality. The luminous oval canvas, in which the elderly Time has uncovered the youthful Truth while casting out Lies, was painted in 1743. Tiepolo is indeed the Genius of Venice, he embodies a whole generation of artists who were great decorators of architectural interiors and who created their work literally between earth and sky, or as the art historian Adriano Maruzi, specialised in Venetian art, states: 'Tiepolo turns Venice, its palaces, and its churches into a theatre where the pagan Olympus and the Christian heaven, the characters of fable and the figures of allegory, and events remote in time and space all become visible, projected into the present. He expends, so to speak, the city's horizons, opening Venice up to a vaster, more meaningful dimension. Though we may call the works "visions" in the case of Tiepolo and "vedut", or "views" in the case of Canaletto, they are both distinguished by the same optical clarity.'

Dr Jorg Zutter is Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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