Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of Sir John Penruddock1631-1632, Oil on canvas, 79 x 103 cm
Brescia – An audacious journey along four centuries, which runs from seventeenth-century, post-Caravaggio and Baroque paintings, to the most daring contemporary paths, comes to life in the rooms of the Castle of Desenzano del Garda.
Considered missing for decades, jealously hung for almost three centuries in the Penruddock house in Compton Park, before being exhibited to the public for the first time in 1902 at the New Gallery of England and identified as an autographed work by Antoon Van Dyck by Charles Holmes, the precious Portrait of John Penruddock confirms the absolute mastery achieved by the Fleming during his first stay in London.
This masterpiece is one of the flagships of the exhibition entitled 1600: the era of Van Dyck / 1900: the journey from de Chirico, produced by MV Arte, curated by Pietro Quattriglia Venneri and Matteo Vanzan, scheduled from 12 August to 8 October.
Giorgio de Chirico, Apollo musagete, 1973, Oil on cardboard, 22 x 29 cm
Within a path divided into two sections, the public will be able to discover works in “first release” such as the Saint Peter by Guercino and the Saint Cecilia attributed to Guido Reni, from a private Tuscan collection, which reveals the Caravaggesque manners learned by the Bolognese master during his stay in Rome.
Baroque Rome is also revealed through another masterpiece to be referred to by the hand of Giacinto Brandi. In the Madeleine of the seventeenth-century master – with languid eyes heavenward, tousled hair, pearly face – the public rediscovers the sense of tragic and theatrical exaggeration which is one of the most expressive notes of the cultural climate of the city in that precise historical moment.
If the first section of the itinerary will be dedicated to national and international seventeenth-century works, the second part will embrace the pictorial research relating to the first forty years of the Italian twentieth century in a total excursus of 50 works. To connect the two moments will be the reflection on the painting of Realism, born in the seventeenth century with the Baroque season to arrive at the gates of the twentieth century when de Chirico, thanks to his classicist matrix painting, becomes a junction point between the two eras by theorizing a Metaphysics which will influence the birth of Surrealism and, together with Francis Bacon, of existential Realism.
Giorgio de Chirico will be fundamental at the same time for a return to order which will give birth to Magical Realism and the New German Objectivity.
Francesco Trombadori, Maternity, Oil on canvas
“Van Dyck, Tiarini, Reni and Guercino – anticipates the curator Pietro Quattriglia Venneri – are just some of the names that make up the Old Masters section, reconnecting in a completely harmonious way to the works selected to represent the modern and contemporary world. They tell us stories that are not that far from us, and I’m not speaking exclusively in chronological terms”.
The exhibition traces the birth of seventeenth-century Realism and its future developments in a pictorial practice that is experienced by taking man and his emotions into consideration.
“Artists such as Van Dyck, Guercino, Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo, Peeter Maurice Bolckmann, Alessandro Tiarini and, in the twentieth century, Giorgio de Chirico, Ugo Celada da Virgilio, Renato Guttuso, Renzo Vespignani, Alberto Sughi, Gianfranco Ferroni, Salvador Dalì, Joan Mirò – continues Matteo Vanzan, director of Mv Arte – have been able to tell life outcomes and reflections on the human condition in the union of intentions that, from seventeenth-century Realism, reaches up to the present day in the interweaving of man, nature and existence in an increasingly wrapped up in the depths of the unfathomable”.
The exhibition will be open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 to 18.30.