1 PINACOTECA DI BRERA BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE BRAIDENSE Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo Via Brera 28, 20121 Milano t +39 02 72263264 - 229 [email protected] www.pinacotecabrera.org press release June, 13th 2016 Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera June, 16th 2016- Grand Opening: free admission from 8.30 a.m. to 10.15 p.m. MANTEGNA AND CARRACCI. AROUND THE LAMENTATION OVER THE DEAD CHRIST Annibale Carracci’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ is coming to Brera 2 to engage in dialogue with Andrea Mantegna’s masterpiece. rom 16 June to 25 September 2016 the Pinacoteca di Brera will be hosting a spectacular new dialogue between two masterpieces in the history of world art: FAndrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, one of the Milan picture gallery’s most emblematic works and a universal icon of the Renaissance, and the Corpse of Christ (or The Body of Christ and the Implements of His Martyrdom), a version of the same subject painted by Annibale Carracci in 1583–1585 and on loan from the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The two works, displayed side by side for the very first time, comprise the second outstanding dialogue devised by the Pinacoteca di Brera, a museum in the process of renewing its approach in an effort to offer its visitors food for thought with a collec- tion that includes some of the most important masterpieces of painting in the world. Mantegna’s work will be shown not only alongside Carracci’s version but also with another version of the same theme, the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, painted by Orazio Borgianni in 1615 and on loan from the Galleria Spada in Rome. Illustrating the painter’s mastery of perspective, and with a strength of expression [SECOND DIALOGUE] coupled with stern composure making it one of the best-known symbols of Ital- Andrea Mantegna: ian art, Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which can be dated to around New Perspectives 1480, was remarkably popular as a model in the 16th and 17th centuries. We know Pinacoteca di Brera this thanks to a prestigious series of works clearly inspired by it, including Carrac- June, 16th 2016 September, 25th 2016 ci’s painting (dated 1583–1585) which underscores the crude realism of the scene by highlighting the instruments of Christ’s martyrdom, focusing in particular on the Crown of Thorns in the foreground to point up the brutality of the torture so recently administered. While the third work in the dialogue, by Orazio Borgianni, develops the theme against a background more reminiscent of Caravaggio’s style. Andrea Mantegna: New Perspectives is the second highly original dialogue between works of art in the museum’s collections and illustrious guests proposed by the Pina- coteca di Brera and its director, James Bradburne, after the encounter of Raphael’s and Perugino’s respective versions of the Marriage of the Virgin, on display until 27 June. The dialogue is once again going to provide us with the opportunity to renovate the Pinacoteca’s rooms, in a series of steps that will eventually lead to the renovation of the entire circuit of rooms over three years. The rooms affected this time are nos. I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII, thus including also a new setting for Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which will wind up this new part of the gallery tour. These dialogues, these “conversations”, are designed to encourage visitors to see the paintings on display in adjacent rooms through different eyes with the help of new panels, fuller captions, new lighting and a totally new colour scheme on the walls, and with visitors asked to give their opinion on every aspect of the renovation at the end of their visit. The tour will gradually lead the visitor to the room where the dialogue between Mantegna and his temporary guests is staged. “What we are implementing here at Brera is a fully-fledged Copernican revolution in which our world centres on the visitor rather than on the institution – explains 3 James Bradburne –. The conversation between Andrea Mantegna and Annibale Carracci is a further step in this revolution based on the creation of “dialogues” with our works, without resorting to the kind of navel-gazing ‘major exhibitions’ that cannibalise visitors’ attention away from the museum’s permanent collections”. After the master-pupil theme of the conversation between Perugino and Raphael, this dialogue revolves around the Pinacoteca’s very identity. “Brera’s identity is inseparable from the Napoleonic past that lies at the origin of its outstanding collections, based chiefly on works from two Italian regions, Lombardy and the Veneto – adds Bradburne – a link that is also expressed in the Accademia di Brera’s ties with the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, which was established at the same time and for many of the same reasons. Thus Brera’s past, present and future indissolubly bind these two institutions and these two cultures together”. To mark the occasion, the internationally famous Italian chamber orchestra “I Solis- ti Veneti” will be holding a concern in the Pinacoteca di Brera on 13 June, and just as happened with the first dialogue, so on this occasion too the museum will be staying open free of charge from 08.30 to 22.15 (last admission 21.40) on 16 June, the day of the dialogue’s official inauguration. [SECOND DIALOGUE] Andrea Mantegna: New Perspectives Pinacoteca di Brera June, 16th 2016 September, 25th 2016 www.pinacotecabrera.org Mantegna and Carracci: the Lamentation over the Dead Christ and its derivations. The remarkable popularity of Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1480) as a model in the 16th and 17th centuries is borne out by a prestigious series of works clearly inspired by it, starting with Sodoma’s youthful Lamentation which can be dated to around 1503. Compared to Mantegna’s austere composition, Sodoma’s work is enlivened by the presence of a considerable number of mourners surround- ing the figure of Christ, who is portrayed diagonally as in the Brera picture. Later meditations on, or derivations inspired by, Mantegna’s work lead us initially into the sphere of Emilian painting, with a small canvas by Lelio Orsi entitled The Dead Christ Between Charity and Justice dating to the 1570s and now in the Galleria Estense in Modena, but more importantly to the magnificent oil painting on canvas by An- nibale Carracci that is Mantegna’s partner in this second Brera dialogue. Carracci may have seen Mantegna’s masterpiece in the collection of Pietro Aldobrandini in Rome, or in the course of its “wanderings through Lombardy” in the 1580s, or pos- sibly even in the shape of one of the 16th century engravings that were familiar tools in Bologna’s Accademia degli Incamminati, where deep interest was shown in the Mantegna Lamentation’s extreme foreshortening on account its members’ studies from life and their naturalistic depiction of the human body. Carracci’s painting in- terprets Mantegna’s masterpiece with an intense, almost “macabre” naturalism, with a boldly foreshortened view of Christ’s body in the foreground highlighting its disjointed state and with a virtuoso display of skill that points unequivocally to the artist’s attempt to compete with his model. Annibale Carracci eliminates from his 4 version the mourners to the left of Mantegna’s painting and shows Christ’s fore- shortened body inclining to one side and taking up the entire canvas in an effort to depict the figure’s chest with shocking realism, its wounds still bleeding, its com- pelling face with the mouth still half-open. Carracci endeavours to highlight his picture’s crude realism by placing the instru- ments of Christ’s passion and the Crown of Thorns in the foreground, testifying to tbe brutality of his very recent martyrdom. The popularity of Mantegna’s foreshort- ened Christ as a model with Caravaggio and his followers is also common knowl- edge, with Orazio Borgianni producing various versions of the Lamentation theme in the 1610s. Two of them (one of which is of outstanding quality) are now in the Palazzo Spada in Rome while the other is in the Roberto Longhi collection in the eponymous foundation in Florence, and all of them share the motif of the vase of unguent in the foreground. The Palazzo Spada painting will be interacting with Car- racci and Mantegna in the Pinacoteca di Brera. Borgianni unquestionably knew the Mantegna picture, which was in the Aldobrandini collection in his day, and used it as the starting point for a work in which the emotional content is evinced through what 18th century critics termed “affetti”, or emotion displayed through gesture and facial expression. [SECOND DIALOGUE] Andrea Mantegna: New Perspectives Pinacoteca di Brera June, 16th 2016 September, 25th 2016 www.pinacotecabrera.org 2 PINACOTECA DI BRERA BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE BRAIDENSE Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo Via Brera 28, 20121 Milano t +39 02 72263264 - 229 [email protected] www.pinacotecabrera.org second dialogue TITLE LABELS Andrea Mantegna: New Perspectives James M. Bradburne, Keith Christiansen, Sarah Dunant, Letizia Lodi, Marina Gargiulo, PLACE Maria Cristina Passoni, Cristina Quattrini, Pinacoteca di Brera, Room 6th Caterina Rocchi, Servizi educativi DATES June, 16th 2016 - September, 25th 2016 DESIGN AND SUPERVISION June, 16th 2016- Grand Opening: free admission James M. Bradburne, Alessandra Quarto, Angelo Rossi 5 from 8.30 a.m. to 10.15 p.m. CURATED BY ACCOMPANYING PUBBLICATION Keith Christiansen EXHIBITED MASTERPIECES Andrea Mantegna Per le immagini Un ringraziamento particolare Lamentation over the Dead Christ agli Amici di Brera e al loro Presidente SPECIAL THANKS TO 1470-1474, tempera on canvas, cm 68 × 81 ing.