The Maurizio Nobile Fine Art gallery in Bologna is offering an appointment entirely dedicated to the history of portraiture and self-portraiture, with an exhibition path that extends from the 16th century to the 20th century. The exhibition, entitled The Beauty of the Portrait, is open to the public from Nov. 18 to Dec. 20, and offers visitors the chance to explore four centuries of artistic research through works of great charm and rarity. The initiative is in the tradition of the gallery, which has always been committed to the enhancement of ancient art and the presentation to the public of new studies, acquisitions and discoveries that expand the historical-critical panorama of painters already known or to be rediscovered.
At the center of the exhibition project are the gallery’s new acquisitions, which include works by Bernardino Licinio, Fra’ Galgario, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Nicolas Regnier and François-Joseph Navez, flanked by works by other protagonists of the long chronological span considered. The common thread is the representation of the individual, read through the stylistic, cultural and iconographic transformations that have marked the way the human face and personal identity have been depicted over the centuries. From Renaissance naturalism to the psychological elaborations of the seventeenth century, from the intimate interpretations of the eighteenth century to the perceptual experiments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the exhibition offers a rich and articulate cross-section of the history of European portraiture.
Among the most significant nuclei are the thirteen studies of heads by Bernardino Licinio, a Venetian painter active between 1465-89 and 1550, considered by critics to be valuable evidence of his workshop work and his method of image construction. The studies, already recognized and confidently attributed by scholars such as Detlev von Hadeln in 1910, Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi and Luisa Vertova, are part of a corpus whose authenticity has never been questioned. Their collecting history is well documented: they appear in the 1623 inventory of Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, and remained the property of the Roman family until 1935. Their presence in the Barberini collection lends further relevance to a body of work that reveals the practice, typical of the 16th century, of storing studies from life in the workshop for future commissions or to elaborate complex compositions. Although some of these faces seem to be linked to a depiction of the Last Supper for which we do not possess documents, their value lies as much in their original function as in their expressive autonomy, capable of restoring a varied repertoire of physiognomies, characters and gazes.
Alongside this rare Licinian ensemble, the exhibition presents a recently rediscovered canvas by Nicolas Régnier, a Flemish-born artist who was among the most cultured and refined figures on the Venetian scene in the second half of the 17th century. The rediscovery of the work offers an opportunity to explore a phase of his production that continues to be the subject of critical analysis and updating. The painting, an imposing unpublished male portrait, is striking for its executive quality and monumental setting, elements that attest to the artist’s full maturity. The figure of the protagonist, a mature man portrayed frontally with a direct gaze and authoritative gesture, is constructed through a skillful orchestration of poses and details that recall the tradition of Venetian official portraits. The elegant clothes, accessories and calibrated luministic rendering contribute to an image that expresses authority and control, while Régnier’s brushstroke, attentive to the definition of materials and the psychological rendering of the subject, allows us to read in the character’s face and attitude a complexity that goes beyond pure social celebration. This is a significant contribution to the knowledge of the portrait production of the artist, whose works, although known to specialists, continue to reserve surprising discoveries.
The exhibition is completed by a number of works that show the variety of ways in which portraiture was able to represent not only the individual, but also his emotional and social context. Prominent among them is the Family Portrait by Bartolomeo Passerotti, a Bolognese artist born in 1529 and active until 1592, known for the vividness of his scenes and his attention to the details of everyday life. The painting presented in the exhibition is an example of a so-called “atteggiato” portrait, in which the naturalness of poses and gestures contributes to the creation of a seemingly spontaneous scene, though constructed with great compositional care. The hands of the two parents, the posture of the little girl who slightly tilts her face and her upward gaze evoke the climate of family portrayals in sixteenth-century Bologna, where the desire to express affections and relationships is intertwined with the aspiration for a dignified representation of one’s social role. The presence of the pair of doves in the foreground is a detail that reveals Passerotti’s interest in the animal world, an interest also documented in his famous “Bestiary,” in which the representation of animals becomes a tool for investigating symbolic analogies and further meanings.
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| Bologna, an exhibition on four centuries of portraiture at Maurizio Nobile Fine Art |
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