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At the Royal Academy for the first comprehensive G.B. Moroni’s solo in the UK

 

What we would suggest if you are visiting the exhibition that the Royal Academy in London is currently dedicating to the Lombard portrait painter Giovan Battista Moroni, 40 pieces gathered together for the artist’s first main exhibition in the UK, is this one: after having carefully observed the subject’s physiognomy, his garments, and the elements indicating his occupation, move your eyes on the background. You will discover that in many cases, such as “The tailor” (1565-1570), the portrait of the aristocratic poet “Isotta Brembati” (c.1555) and that of the Jesuit writer Giovanni Pietro Maffeis, or also the beautiful and mysterious “Black Knight” (1550-1575) – this latter is preserved at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, who has not loaned the masterpiece to the RA –, the setting is totally dissonant, but sometimes extraordinary expressive.

 

If Moroni’s figures are characterized by a precise realism, even if the subject is not an aristocrat but a specific ordinary man, the architectures containing them are in some way abstracted, not defined, suspended, and sometime detached from the character at the point that you have the feeling that they could have been painted by other hands, and perhaps also in another time. It is probably also because of this lack of homogeneity between the subject and the background – more then the fact that Vasari hadn’t mentioned him in the “Vite” – that Moroni has always been considered a sort of minor master, even if Titian himself knows him very well, and suggested him to a couple Venetian patricians to take up governmental positions in Bergamo; and even if Moretto, Moroni’s master in Brescia, took him in high consideration too, and accepted to collaborate with him in Trento, as proved in a document from 1549. But today this almost surrealistic effect produced by Moroni’s portraits is what could make him so interesting and unpredictable for us.

July 18, 2015