#RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE SERIES#

Although it was part of the Venetian Republic during the sixteenth century, Bergamo was geographically-and, in some ways, culturally-closer to the Duchy of Milan, then under Spanish rule. Moroni was born in the early 1520s in Albino, a small city less than ten miles from Bergamo. But MoroniвЂ™s characterization as an artist who faithfully recorded the world around him-whether understood as a positive quality or a weakness-has obscured his creativity and innovation as a portraitist. Bernard Berenson derided him in 1907 as an uninventive portraitist who вЂњgives us sitters no doubt as they looked.вЂќ Subsequent scholars restored his reputation the art historian Roberto Longhi, for example, in 1953 praised MoroniвЂ™s вЂњdocumentsвЂќ of society that were unmediated by style, crediting him with a naturalism that anticipated Caravaggio. The naturalism for which Moroni was most acclaimed, however, also became a point of criticism: his apparent faithfulness to his models caused some to dismiss him as a mere copyist of nature, an artist without вЂњartвЂќ-that is, without selection, editing, or adherence to ideals of beauty. According to an anecdote first published in 1648 in Carlo RidolfiвЂ™s Le meraviglie dellвЂ™arte, Titian, when approached by a group of would-be patrons, recommended that they instead sit for Moroni, praising his ritratti di naturaleВ (portraits from life).

#RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE SERIES#

Presented in the FrickвЂ™s main floor Oval Room and East Gallery, this exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue and series of public programs.Д¬reator of both religious paintings and portraits, Moroni is best known for works that seem to capture his sitters exactly as they appeared before him. Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance PortraitureВ was organized by Aimee Ng, Associate Curator, The Frick Collection Simone Facchinetti, Researcher, UniversitГ del Salento, Lecce and Arturo Galansino, Director General, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. They will be shown alongside a selection of complementary objects-Renaissance jewelry, textiles, arms and armor, and other luxury items-that exemplify the material and visual world that Moroni recorded, embellished, and transformed. This winter and spring, the Frick presents the first major exhibition in North America devoted to his work, bringing together nearly two dozen of MoroniвЂ™s most arresting and best known portraits from international collections to explore the innovations and experiments that belie his masterful illusion of recording reality. Though Moroni never achieved their fame, he innovated the genre of portraiture in spectacular ways. The artist spent his entire career in and around his native Bergamo, a region in Lombardy northeast of Milan, and left a corpus of portraits that far outnumbers those of his contemporaries who worked in major artistic centers, including Titian in Venice and Bronzino in Florence. This notion-that art can capture an individual exactly as he or she appears-is exemplified in the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni. In Renaissance Italy, one of the aims of portraiture was to make the absent seem present through naturalistic representation of the sitter.

Frick to Present First Major North American Exhibition on Renaissance Painter Giovanni Battista Moroni

Renaissance portraiture