Two greats exhibitions to see in the city of Venice
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Bellini, Madonna col Bambino Carzago (Brescia), Fondazione Luciano e Agnese Sorlini |
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FROM BELLINI TO TIEPOLO Great Venetian painting from Sorlini Foundation The exhibition presents a rich selection of works from the vast Sorlini collection. These fifty Venetian paintings date from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and usually hang in the various residences of the family. Here, they are brought together for the first time in a public exhibition that provides a most stimulating account of three centuries of art in the Venetian Republic.
This exhibition, therefore, not only presents the public with an important collection of paintings produced in the Venetian Republic from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, it also charts the growth of the collection put together by Luciano and Agnese Sorlini. The fruit of a love of art and a passionate interest in culture, the collection began in the immediate post-war period, initially to provide works that would embellish the couple’s homes in Lombardy and the Veneto. Ultimately, in 2002, it would lead to the creation of the Fondazione Luciano e Agnese Sorlini in the Brescia area, intended to make this extraordinary assembly of artistic wealth available to the public.
Housed in the neo-classical area on the first floor of the Museo Correr, the exhibition comprises fifty paintings from Venice and the surrounding area. Dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, these normally hang in the family’s various residences, but are here gathered together to provide a stimulating insight into the development of art within the Venetian Republic.
Amongst the works on loan one that stands out is the Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child (formerly the Contini Bonacossi Madonna). However, it is the very completeness and variety of the works that is surprising.
The artists represented include Padovanino, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Gianantonio Pellgrini, Jacopo Amigoni, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Pietro Longhi and Giandomenico Tiepolo; and the works - sacred images, mytholgical scenes, landscapes, vedute and portraits - effectively summarise the ideas, values and variety of artistic languages within Venetian culture as a whole.
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PAUL GAUGUIN Le Cheval blanc (1898) |
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A GAUGUIN MASTERPIECE AT CA’PESARO: ’Le Cheval blanc’ from the Musée d’Orsay
The painting is on loan by kind concession of Musée d’Orsay within the co-operation between Musei Civici Veneziani and the organizers of Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka exhibition holden at Grand Palais in Paris until the 23rd of January. For that event Ca’ Pesaro has lent Klimt’s Judith II.
The pictures produced in the years 1898-99 are the most serene – perhaps the most authentically Tahitian – of any Gauguin ever painted.
This is particularly true of Le Cheval Blanc [The White Horse], which was inspired by a detail from the Parthenon frieze yet achieves a sort of arcane simplicity. In effect, Gauguin draws not only upon the image of the horse created by Phidias but also upon the colour associations of Polynesian culture, for which white is the colour of the supernatural and is linked with ideas of power and death. Thus a source from Classical Antiquity is combined with a symbolic use of colour.
In spite of the title, the white horse is not really white; its appearance is the result of an amalgam of the lighter colours than appear in the painting. One might say that the horse’s ‘whitened’ appearance bears out the theories of perception exemplified by the works of the Impressionists (one whom, Pissarro, first initiated Gauguin to modern painting).
Like the pictures already produced at Pont-Aven, this is painted from a raised point of view, this placing the landscape level with the pictorial surface itself; whilst the motif of the sinuous blue branches serves to place the nude horse-riders in a sort of a-temporal distance. This is a example of Gauguin at his best, a perfect – and very difficult – fusion of the poetic and the decorative.
“The colours might almost be said to derive from and to complement each other; this is a harmony based on dissonance. In the stream, the water is of a blue that tends towards violet, with highlights of yellow that tend towards orange […] The white horse is of a perceptible, delicate grey, within which are reflected all the surrounding colours. In this muting of tone, there is a delicacy based on discretion and calm; there is a suggestion of light without the full depiction of light effects. Similarly, the perspective effect is left unaccomplished. The result is a sort of uncertainty – the uncertainty of the hot hours of the day, of solitary places, of plant life. The intense colours do not excite one; they dazzle, inducing a lethargic calm.” [Lionello Venturi, 1934]
Further Information
DA BELLINI A TIEPOLO
La grande pittura veneta dalla collezione Sorlini
Venezia, Museo Correr
October 9th 2005/ February 26th 2006
Opening hours: 10AM - 5PM
Tickets: full price € 4,00 reduced € 2,00
Catalog: Marsilio Ed.
Curated by Filippo Pedrocco
UN GAUGUIN A CA’ PESARO
Le cheval blanc dal Musée d’Orsay di Parigi
Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna- Ca’ Pesaro
October 14th 2005 / January 23rd 2006
Opening hours: 10am - 5pm
Closed on Mondays
Tickets: full price € 5,50 reduced: € 3,00
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