by Jaynie Anderson

When travelling through Italian Museums and Galleries any Australian admirer of Italian culture will be overwhelmed by the excellence of different regional schools and artists throughout the Italian peninsular. Italy is a country where regionalism is of great importance, for the nation was only united in 1861, and local pride in the cultural life of individual cities is made manifest in excellent exhibitions about the Italian national heritage. The exhibition, called The Italians is an ambitious romp through three centuries, from 1500 to 1800. It showcases that diversity in regional excellence, and places in context the achievements of artists from different regions, placing lesser known artists such as the Bassano and Lotto, alongside more famous names, such as Titian or Tiepolo. In the period leading to Italian unification it was greatly debated where the capital of Italy should be, and for some the answer was Turin, for others Florence, until they finally settled on Rome. It will prove equally difficult for the Australian public to choose between the artists of regions of Italy, who are so well represented by works of the highest quality in this ambitious exhibition, but without such political consequences.

In the choice of artists we recognise those names that signal Florentine genius, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo, represented by a magnificent series of drawings, but also lesser known Emilians, Lombards and Neapolitans, like Barocci and Caravaggio. Major Italian museums and private collectors have been extremely generous in lending exceptional works of great quality to an Australian celebration of Italian genius. Australia is a country that has benefited from Italian emigration, principally from the North and South of Italy. The benefits of Italian culture have been considerable, just think of the Italian impact on our art, cuisine, literature, and cinema. Most Australians hope, as I do, that these cultural interchanges will continue.

The exhibition opens with an introductory section on what constitutes the foundation of painting, disegno. There is a small group of drawings, showing how Florentine artists explored artistic forms, preparatory to painting. A holy image of Christ's face, drawn in firm chiaroscuro modelling by Leonardo, brings to mind his vanishing masterpiece of the Last Supper from Milan. No more haunting expression of Christ's face has ever been created. Two fine working drawings by Michelangelo, give us some idea of Michelangelo's conceptions of the male body. One, a Study for the Resurrected Christ, a tentative black chalk drawing on paper shows him drawing freely from a male model. The other, in red chalk, is an exploration of the body of an older man leaning on an architectural motif. It is an idea related to those figures resting on the lunettes of the Sistine Ceiling, where representations of masculine forms surround architectural ones. Michelangelo drew for most of his life, and gave away highly finished drawings of Ideal Heads as presents to his close friends. But he could also be secretive, and destroyed many works on paper at his deathbed. These two working drawings are of the secretive kind, that escaped destruction, from his own collection, conserved in his house in Florence, the Casa Buonarotti, one of the earliest museums based on the house of an artist.

It was in Italy in the sixteenth century that the Italians invented art history and art criticism, principally exemplified by the writings of Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the first biographical account of the artists in 1550, a model that has been followed for centuries until the present day. Most of these regional schools of artists have their own version of Vasari, though inevitably a less famous clone. Like all theorists, Vasari imposed his Florentine interpretation on what happened in the sixteenth century upon his contemporaries and his successors, favouring like all critics, his Mannerist friends. His method was to describe those artists by their works and anecdotes about them. He marginalised or excluded many artists from other Italian cities, often repeating the negative criticisms of other artists. It is interesting to compare two of his biographical accounts of Florentine Mannerists. In Vasari's life of Bacchiacca, an artist who is represented in this exhibition by a fine Madonna and child accompanied by the infant St John, there are anecdotes about an artist, who delighted in the representation of animals and painted for Cosimo dei Medici. Vasari praises him for his designs of silk for the embroidery of a bed, and Bacchiaca's skill and fascination with luxurious materials is evident in this devotional picture of great beauty.

Among the Florentine mannerists the star of the exhibition will certainly prove to be Rosso Fiorentino's canvas of Moses defending the Daughters of Jethro, a painting which celebrates heroic masculinity. It is mentioned in Vasari's biography of Rosso as a picture of 'some beautiful nudes in a scene of Moses slaying the Egyptians'. Although seemingly casual the description is revealing. Here is a religious painting executed for a private patron, presumably just like Bacchiacca's Madonna, except that here the work is predominantly an excuse for the artist to display his virtuosity in the depiction of male nudity. The women whose virtue is defended are to be seen across the top of the canvas, as elegant but fugitive presences. Vasari's Life of Rosso, an artist who escaped from Florence to Paris, fleeing from the law, is full on anecdotes. The most surprising one is of Rosso's pet baboon, 'more like a man than an animal', according to Vasari, who destroyed a priest's vineyard and pergola. In all Vasari gives the impression that Rosso was constantly preoccupied with drawing the nude figure, whether alive or as an anatomical specimen, so that his pictures were excuses for these demonstrations of difficulty, rather than attentive to theological meaning.

What would have happened should Vasari have been born in Venice, or some other part of the peninsular? Perhaps his accounts of the Venetians would have been very much more positive. For Vasari most art produced after the era of Michelangelo never matched the quality of former days. Venetian artists were dismissed as only interested in colour rather than drawing. The artist who initiated the high renaissance in Venice was Giorgione. He painted very few pictures in the space of little more than a decade. Vasari has left a short interesting biography of this man, whom he says lived for love. In the exhibition there is one work attributed to Giorgione. It is certainly what one might call Giorgionesque in spirit. For it subscribes to that kind of romantic portrait painting which he invented, which suggests a great deal about the subject's imaginings, and forces the spectator to engage in interpretation. On one level it is a charming double portrait of two men. A fashionable young patrician man, dressed in black with soulful eyes, is shown holding a seville orange. He looks desperately in love, but with whom? His companion in the background, is depicted as an ignoble person, and has a rather worried expression on his face. Is he a servant, or the object of the man's thoughts. Is this a portrait about homosexual or heterosexual love, or both? It is from the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, and so regional is Italian art history that few Venetian art historians have discussed the picture in print recently. It is optimistically attributed to Giorgione, but becomes a more interesting picture if we put aside the question of attribution and one focuses upon interpret the nature of male friendship represented. Another theme throughout the exhibition is of homo eroticism, as exemplified in Tanzio da Varallo's superb David with the Head of Goliath, a subject invented by Giorgione for the Renaissance.

The most erotic Venetian picture in the exhibition from a heterosexual viewpoint is Titian's representation of Danaë, being raped by Jupiter, from the Museo Capodimonte in Naples. In order to assume the most cunning of disguises Jupiter has become a shower of gold coins, which Danaë, supine on her bed, looks at entranced, as they are about to impregnate her body. Cupid is more apprehensive. On one level the painting is a representation of a mythological story, but on another evokes the contemporary Venetian world of courtesans, which Aretino described in letters and dialogues. For some art historians it is just a sexy picture, for others a demonstration of Titian's skill in displaying the female body in a complex pose. The subject of a woman at rest was invented in antiquity, and reinvented by Giorgione in 1508 with his famous Sleeping Venus in Dresden, where the goddess is shown lying on a sumptuous bed in a grotto in the landscape. And from then on, the genre of the well proportioned Venetian woman lying on a bed was developed by Titian in a remarkable series of images for princes, cardinals and kings in Europe. Under Titian's name there are also new discoveries here, which will prove controversial, such as the so-called Portrait of Aretino by Titian, which appears to be neither by Titian, nor a good likeness of Aretino. Good controversies are needed for exhibitions, and this will provide one. Poor Aretino if he had been bedevilled with this appearance how could he have lived up to his reputation.

Venetian art is dominated by a series of family workshops, such as that of the Bassano family, represented here with the remarkable canvas of the Martyrdom of St Catherine, from the museum of their home town, the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa. The depiction of the event is a remarkable tour de force of nude bodies falling all over the canvas, beneath the saint, who is about to depart for paradise. Did Bassano have his studio full of little sculptures that he adapted for his works, like Tintoretto? This picture certainly suggests that he did work like Tintoretto. There is a literalism about Jacopo Bassano's painting, which brings to mind the concerns of the Counter Reformation, a movement when churchmen asked that religious imagery should be made comprehensible to the Catholic public.
Another artist of the sixteenth century Lorenzo Lotto, in such works as the Annunciation to the Virgin, from Recanati, in the Marche, is similarly concerned with a fundamentalist interpretation of religious imagery. In one letter Lotto writes that he was inspired by the religious stories as he heard them in Domenican friars' sermons. Lotto's version of the Annunciation is celebrated for not obeying rules of decorum. According to Leonardo painters should not portray the Virgin as if she appeared frightened by the angel, who brings such terrifying news to her. Instead she should be represented in a refined manner, her eyes downcast. Lotto has shown her apprehension, with the force of St Luke's words realised: 'And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.' Not only is she quivering with expectation from fear, but her expression is mirrored and intensified by a frightened cat in the background. Although one of the best documented artists in the Venetian sixteenth century Lotto's work has only recently begun to be interpreted. He moved between different cities, Venice, Bergamo and Loreto, where he died, and so his reputation has fallen between the cracks of the regions. In a series of great Venetian exhibitions in London, Paris, Washington, and Venice, over the last three decades, Lotto has become a star. The rooms where his works are shown are always more crowded than any others with twentieth first century artists, who find Lotto's works more immediately accessible than those of his contemporaries.

An exhibition such as the one brought to Canberra and Melbourne opens up new avenues of knowledge, research and debate, in what one might have thought was well known territory. For Italians have been generous in lending paintings that are at the centre of debates and revivals. They will certainly engage with the Australian public and encourage them to visit Italy, and will also promote the study of art history. Masterpieces from celebrated Italian museums are mixed with lesser known works from Italian private collections. The choice will inevitably change the cannon of what is considered worthy of study in Italian art history in Australia. Despite the difficulty of transport even two sculptures are included, Bernini's marble portrait of Pope Clement X, accompanied by Canova's statue of two boxers by from his house in Possagno.

Turning to a lesser known part of the Lombard School, from the charming hill town of Bergamo, one of my favourite cities, there are number of masterpieces by artists, that may not be well known to the Australian public, but which will enchant. The portrait of Gian Gerolomo Grumelli, known as the Knight in Pink, dated 1560, is one of the most extraordinary North Italian portraits of the sixteenth century. For many centuries it has been in the private collection of the Counts Moroni, in Bergamo, who have generously lent the painting to the exhibition. The painter Giovanni Battista Moroni worked mostly in Northern Italy for a patrician clientele, in the Lombard cities of Bergamo and Brescia. He was born in the 1520's at Albino, a small town to the north east of Bergamo, and died in 1578. About his own personality little is known, except that he seems to have had a harmonious relationship with his wealthy patrons and post Council of Trent churchmen.

The portrait likeness is a northern patrician response to Titian's standing portrait of Philip II, for Moroni's portrait imagery was conceived in competition with Titian, his Venetian contemporary. The picture is painted in the period of Moroni's activity known as 'the red style' (maniera rossa). Gian Gerolamo is a warm figure against the cool tonality of the grey architectural ruins behind him, adorned with fragments of ancient sculpture and teasing inscriptions. The knight, aged twenty four, is dressed in luxurious Spanish clothing for his second wedding in 1561 with Isotta Brembati. His first marriage in 1560 to Maria Secco d'Aragona di Calcio, had ended abruptly with her death. His costume is one of impeccable refinement, and the luxury of the silk, a tribute to that industry in Bergamo. The Spanish inscription, translated as: 'Better the last than the first', has been interpreted by a nineteenth century writer from Bergamo as a message between the two lovers, who had both previously been married. This second marriage was going to be the best. Grumelli himself was a writer and poet, and it is not impossible that he invented the inscription, or chose Moroni because he was good at such enigmatic conceits. The ivy creeping over the niche, in which there is a fragment of ancient sculpture, fallen on the ground, is a symbol of the constancy of love in relation to the broken sculpture, that denotes fragility and vanity.

Other works from Bergamo include the portrait by Vittore Ghislandi, known as Fra Galgario, one of the greatest Lombard portrait painters, whose life spans the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Galgario's work will be celebrated this year with an exhibition in Bergamo, a town that in recent years has developed as a major centre for innovative conceptual exhibitions. This vivacious portrait of a young intellectual painter, is of a young apprentice, Giovan Battista Vertova, known as Cerighetto. It appears to be an affectionate characterisation of a young artist, dressed in a jacket that is too large for him. Many portraits by Galgario, such as this were in the collection of his patron Giacomo Carrara, a great figure, whose name was given to the principal museum in Bergamo, the Accademia Carrara.

Evaristo Baschenis, another underestimated artist from Bergamo, was a Jesuit, who avoided religious painting, and concentrated on still life. Most of his works remain in private collections in Bergamo, and rarely reach museums, let alone the art market. Painted for domestic rooms, usually the dining room of a Bergamo palazzo, these paintings present musical variations on one another, like the musical instruments that they depict. At first they are seemingly repetitive, but they become mesmeric and intriguing. The musical instruments in the paintings are often covered in dust, so life like that the spectator feels like reaching for a duster.

The exhibition has a sensational Baroque section, beginning with works by Passerotti and the Campi, who have recently been the subject of major exhibitions in Italy. They are the artists who introduced Lombard realism to the Carracci in Bologna, and to Caravaggio, who was born in Lombardy. Most Australian s will know Caravaggio through Peter Robb's book, M. There is certainly a number of major works to intrigue and question who Caravaggio was, and how theses works should be interrogated.
Like all great Italian exhibitions this one is full of sensual objects, such as Guido Cagnacci's gorgeous Allegory of Human Life. Cagnacci, who delighted in eroticism, has represented under the pretext of an Allegory, an image of a beautiful young woman, holding an hour glass, and a carnation. Above her is a snake, who closes his own eternal ring to bit his tail in an emblem of eternity. The death's head at her side, and perhaps the greenish shade of her skin, warn us that her beauty is fleeting.

The exhibition concludes with eighteenth-century images of Italian cities, principally Venice. Here there are Canaletto's views from the Custom's house of the Library of Sansovino and the Palazzo Ducale, and of the opposing view of the Piazza San Marco seen from beneath the clock tower. Much of the literature on Canaletto is about how accurate the pictures are, and how they were interpreted by the English gentlemen, who bought them as souvenirs on their grand tour to Italy. In at least one of these views it is rather interesting to see how the Piazza San Marco was a place where shopping took place and objects were bought from stores beneath tents, perhaps these very pictures. A later view of Venice by Luca Carlevaris, taken from beneath the portico of Sansovino's Marciana Library, looks along the Riva degli Schiavone, where sailboats anchored. Other urban landscapes reveal other cities in Italy.

At the end of the exhibition a visitor may be able to construct their own personal journey through three centuries of Italian painting. Each person can thread a string of pearls from these masterpieces with different arguments and she or he can write their own Vasarian version of events.

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