THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES the artistic patrimony of a co-operative bank is above all the patrimony Annual Report 2009 Faces without names of its members, but it is also the cultural heritage of the entire community. it is with this conviction that each year Banca Popolare di there are no travellers that are freer and more indiscreet than money. they never sondrio publishes an insert devoted to its art collection to accompany stay too long in one place, they are not aware of borders, they do not obey any the annual report. boss, they don’t get old and they don’t know death. much the same could be said of paintings. Paintings also travel and leave the country: they circulate, like money, sometimes being its equivalent. or its objective correlative. i have INDeX oF EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURY WORKs always been fascinated by bank collections. For two reasons. anonymity and page heterogeneity. Behind every collection of paintings there is the individual Unknownpainterfromthe18thcentury adventure of a man, a woman or a family: the most eccentric collection also Portrait of a nun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 reveals the taste of its collector – even the frames have their say. its destiny FrancescoSolimenaalsoknownasl’AbateCiccio is ephemeral: dispersion. But who collects pictures for a bank? who is it that The arrival of the ashes of St. John the Baptist in Genoa . .. 3 chooses, buys, conserves? his destiny is persistence. the story of a bank art GiuseppeAntonioPetrini(attributed) collector is anonymous because it is collective – and reveals not the taste of one St. Peter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 person, but of a group; not the dream of a visionary, but the group’s appurtenance PietroLigari to a place: a city, a region, a valley. the one in which the bank was born, where St. Francis Saverio baptises an Indian princess . .. 31 it grew, where it put down roots. this means that apparently heterogeneous GiacomoCerutialsoknownasIlPitocchetto(?) images that the collection gathers together tell the story of a place – reflecting Portrait of a girl . .. 40 the taste of those that lived there. the subject prevails over the painter – as GiacomoFrancescoCipperalsoknownasIlTodeschini though anonymity were a transitive property. so, even though they were painted Card players . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 at different times and in different styles, silvio Poma’s young woman and child VittoriaLigari appear to walking along the bank of the same river where the ruminating cows Moses rescued from the waters . .. 50 graze and the XVIII century fisherman the same river the Formis’ cows are about to ford. anonymity also infects the subjects. there is nothing more touching than VittoriaLigari Moses Scorns the Pharaoh . .. 51 an anonymous portrait. anonymous, not because we don’t know who painted it – but because we don’t know the name of the person represented. You used Emilianpainter(?)fromtheEighteenthcentury to order a portrait to commemorate special occasions in your life. to remember Elijah and Rebecca at the well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 the person in their unique and unrepeatable individuality. to say that you had Emilianpainter(?)fromtheEighteenthcentury lived – and left a trace of yourself. But not knowing the name of the person Jacob and Rachel at the Well . 60 makes it impossible to understand the truth behind the image. an anonymous VenetopainterfromtheEighteenthcentury portrait becomes mute and it’s us that have to give it back a voice. think of the Rural landscape with farmers and fishermen . . . . . . . . . . . 61 beautiful XVIII century nun who lets us enter her cell, elegant in the black habit VenetopainterfromtheEighteenthcentury of her order. she is leafing through her missal and gives us a mischievous smile. Rural landscape with windmill and farmers . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 But what was that smile meant to communicate to us? the elegance of the jewel SebastianoDeAlbertis that hangs on her habit, in the place of the cilice, reveals that she was a rich nun. Charge of the Carabinieri in the Battle of Pastrengo . .. 70 But what was her name? what did she find in a convent? Power, faith, solitude? AchilleBefaniFormis and who was the woman of a certain age painted by Pitocchetto (or by a painter Return to the plains . .. 71 very close to him), who looks at the painter (or her children? her husband? or at SilvioPoma us?) in such a melancholy way? and who were the card players and cheats, the Bellagio point from the midlake shore . 80 penniless musician and the rascally onion-seller with the shaved head who posed SilvioPoma ASSEMBLEA for cipper in some tavern four centuries ago? in the child’s clear eyes there isn’t Lake Como, Cadenabbia shore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 ANNUAL REPORT 2009 sadness – if anything, a pallid happiness. Because someone is giving him time SilvioPoma ORDINARIA DEI SOCI and attention, and for the first time the urchin realises that even his miserable Morning in Valmadrera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 life has a certain dignity and a value. Like paintings, money is mute as well. it is EdwinHenryBoddington we who give them a meaning, a dignity and a value. money and paintings were Landscape on the river with a hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 27 MARZO 2010 meant to meet – and to belong to each other. EdwinHenryBoddington Melania G. Mazzucco Landscape on the river with a fisherman . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Writer 000_000_Copertina_Eng_Impianti.indd 1 12/05/10 08.16 Banca Popolare di Sondrio 2009 FINANCIAL STATEMENTS 1 3 9 TH Y E A R From the BPS art collection The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A century is not necessarily synonymous with a single style. When we talk about the eighteenth century or nineteenth century, we are not indicating a particular stylistic school or a family of styles, but rather we are defi ning a time period within which totally contrasting styles a times succeed one another. Let’s take the example of the eighteenth century. It began with Late Baroque, developed into Rococo, and ended with Neoclassicism, which is the total antithesis of Baroque and Rococo. Not to mention that the entire century was marked by an academic classicism in total contrast to the excesses of Baroque and Rococo. The same can be said of the nineteenth century that began with realism and ended with the Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh and Gauguin. It reveals the painting of history, but is mostly characterised by the discovery of the natural landscape, or of nature in contrast to history. The artist strives to describe nature through the utmost realism, but soon realises that what is represented is none other than the artist’s own intimate and subjective vision of nature or, in other words, his own impression. And this very impression is what the artist always attempts to transfer to the canvas, in a process that from external reality leads him little by little to his own inner self and subconscious, until the early twentieth century, following cubism, when reality did not dissolve and, as Kandinsky said, only its pure, abstract, and “spiritual” form remained on the canvas. And yet, when faced with a work of art, there is something that spontaneously spurs us to say that it is a work of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, as if there were a spiritual hallmark of the century underlying all the stylistic changes. During the eighteenth century, for example, even the most classic artists gave in to that aristocratic theatricalism of representation, typical of the Baroque and Rococo, that imbues even the most rigid forms Unknown painter from the 18th century of Neo-Classicism, while in the nineteenth century, a bourgeois sentiment of Portrait of a nun reality prevails, persisting even when its representation becomes, towards the Oil on canvas, 96.5 x 71cm (oval) end of the century, increasingly subjective and problematic. All in all, centuries-long overviews put art in relation to the evolution of all of society, giving a historical sense to the evolution of styles. Baroque, Rococo, or Romanticism did not constitute something uniform and compact, but rather developed according to national peculiarities and, within these, according to regional diversities, often of great impact, that became essential in understanding the contribution of individual artists and local schools to the elaboration of a style and the signifi cance of the role it played in different cultural contexts. Today we know, for example, to what extent eighteenth century Lombard painting was characterised by a diverse sentiment of reality compared to that of other regions and how this characteristic continued uninterruptedly in Lombard painting from Caravaggio onwards. In the Collection of the Banca Popolare di Sondrio, this can be seen in many eighteenth century Lombard works where this naturalistic realism More than a nun or an abbess, this oval prevails, leading to a disdain for Baroque and Rococo excesses and holding the artists to a self-regulating classicism, even if through the persistent theatrical painting by an unknown 18th century master dimensions of the representation. Painters of reality include Giacomo Ceruti, seems to portray a “guastallina”, as the “il Pitocchetto”, and the