Rome Brescia Rome

SAVOLDO BORGHESE

11 October – 24 November 2024

Brescia pays homage to Rome | Rome pays homage to Brescia

From the synergy between the Borghese Gallery and the House Museum of the Paolo and Carolina Zani Foundation comes the Roma Brescia Roma project, the culturale twinning

that connects the two prestigious Italian art collections.

The project, conceived and coordinated by Massimiliano Capella, Director of the House Museum of the Paolo and Carolina Zani Foundation, and Emanuela Settimi, Curator of the Borghese Gallery, initiates the collaboration through a double exhibition, in Brescia and Rome.

From 11 October to 24 November 2024, on the occasion of the Savoldo Borghese capsule exhibition, the Zani House Museum exceptionally exhibits two masterpieces by Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo (Brescia 1480 ca. – Venice ? post 1548), one of the fathers of Brescian Renaissance painting, from the Borghese Gallery. At the same time, two Busts of the Roman Emperor from the Zani collection, attributable to the circle of Guglielmo and Giovanni Battista della Porta, will inhabit the Hall of the Emperors in the Borghese Gallery.

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THE BORGHESE SAVOLDO | Rome to Brescia 

In the room dedicated to temporary exhibitions, Casa Museo Zani exhibits the Bust of a Young Man and Tobias and the Angel by Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo (Brescia 1480 ca. – Venice? Post 1548). The canvases, on loan from the Borghese Gallery, are unanimously considered by critical historiography among the works of greatest lyricism within the artist’s catalog, counted – with Moretto and Romanino – among the noble fathers of Reinessance painting of Brescia and Lombard origin.

In the Bust of a Young Man, a boy without elements useful for his identification is portrayed in three – quarter view on a dark background, in the act of reaching out towards the viewer, within a confined space. There are two plausible hypotheses, although without documentary evidence: some believe it is a portrait from life of an unknown patron – perhaps belonging to the circle of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini – by others the preparatory study for the figure of St. John the Evangelist the Evangelist in the lost Deposition Cross in Berlin, dated 1537. What is certain, hower, is that the work is the testimony of the crestal phase in which, not completely abandoning the typical stylistic features of Lombard figurative culture, the author evolves in the use of colors and the treatment of light, in the light of the important lesson of Titian.

Also indebted to Titian’s lesson is the biblical-themed canvas Tobias and the Angel, considered one of the most important examples of Savoldo’s production. It is in fact through the use of bright colors that the painter simulates the expedient of a light source which, from the background of the composition, strikes the angel, placing the young man’s face in dim light, making the drapery silky, shiny and particularly material, with almost metallic folds.

It was William Suida, in 1937, who was the first to compare the figure of the announcing angel of Savoldo to that of Titian’s Averoldi Polyptych, a masterpiece created in 1522 for the church of Santi Nazaro e Celso in Brescia. The beginning of the convinced adherence to Titian’s ways dates back to then, which around the middle of the third decade of the sixteenth century began to characterize a particularly happy phase of Savoldo’s production. A further example of this is the rendering of the landscape, constructed by means of dark masses and a bright use of color which emerges particularly clearly in the rendering of the fabrics of the two protagonists.