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A Cult Favorite Enters the Art Canon
Giovanni Battista Moroni, long overlooked, is the new Renaissance face at the Frick Collection.
It’s not often that the paintings of an Italian Renaissance master arrive in a New York museum unadorned by the aura of fame and towering talent, but so it is with Giovanni Battista Moroni. The art of this 16th-century painter who excelled at remarkably naturalistic portraits is having its first American survey at the Frick Collection in “Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture.” Partly because Moroni’s reputation does not much precede him in this country, the show’s 23 portraits have a stunning freshness and clarity. We have the sense of seeing for ourselves — and there is much to look at.
Part of this freshness is inherent: Moroni’s paintings themselves are unencumbered. He scrutinized reality with a new directness and tried to record what he saw. His relatively low-key style adds to his portraits’ transparency, the feeling that we are looking at real people as they existed — unidealized, meticulously observed and psychologically present, especially in their direct appraising gazes.
The grand old man thought to be Gabriele Albani, in a portrait that Moroni painted around 1572-73, wears a lavish lynx-lined robe, but he also has a prominent bump in the middle of his forehead — although its suggestion of a third eye is not without a certain grandeur. Even more strikingly honest is the wrinkled face and goiter of Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, who holds a prayer book in hands that the catalog suggests were painted from a younger model once the painting’s subject was no longer available. That Moroni did not add wrinkles here is testament that he could not paint what was not in front of him.
A realist can have only so much painterly style or temperament. Perhaps that’s why Moroni was left out of Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists,” and, so, from the dominant narrative of Italian Renaissance art history over the succeeding centuries. Bernard Berenson slighted him by observing that Moroni “gives us sitters no doubt as they looked,” as if it were a small thing. You don’t look to Moroni for freely painted details that disintegrate into dazzling flourishes upon closer examination — as with 17th-century painters like Velázquez or Franz Hals.
Moroni honed closer to the facts of silver flecked brocade, velvet fringe, opulent jewels and fine embroidery in black or red silk thread that embellishes so many collars and cuffs in portraits of both men and women. (There’s a kind of Where’s Waldo? game to be had in ferreting out the red-on-white embroidery and the small pink bows that adorn the elaborate, often bejeweled coiffure of several of the women.)
Moroni did not stint in his attention to articles of clothing as carriers of wealth and status, but he also makes us see them as indications of painstaking craft that in many ways paralleled his own skills. His scrutiny of the real is underscored by the inclusion in the exhibition of cases of objects and printed material that appear in these paintings — admirably near-matches tracked down by the show’s curators, Aimee Ng, of the Frick; Simone Facchinetti of the Museo Adriano Bernareggi in Bergamo; and Arturo Galansino of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
The most generously accoutered figure is in the show’s first portrait, “Isotta Brembati,” a poet and a countess sitting in a Dante chair. Even her earrings have pink bows. Brembati’s many accessories include a jeweled cross with hanging pearls; a shrug made from a marten pelt with a gold-covered head and, finally, a fan of pink and white stripes of feathers (or maybe fur).
The son of an architect, Moroni spent most of his life working in Albano, in northern Italy, where he was born sometime between 1520 and 1524, and in other regional cities like Brescia, Bergamo and Trent before returning to his birthplace, where he died in 1579 or 1580. In the 1540s he trained under Alessandro Bonvicino in Brescia, better known as Moretto (or the Moor) of Brescia, and was also influenced by the precision of Lorenzo Lotto, who had spent several years in the city. Renaissance portraiture was an expanding genre: Moretto would paint the period’s first full-length portrait of a standing man. Moroni would go on to paint the first full-length standing portrait of a woman and we see it here: Pace Rivola Spini, in a red satin dress, who pulls back her black overdress, perhaps to emphasize her baby bump.
Moroni’s most famous portrait may be familiar even if his name, until now, is not. “The Tailor,” from around 1570, on loan to the United States for the first time from the National Gallery, London, is unusual for its depiction of an artisan pursuing his craft; holding shears, he is about to cut the expanse of fabric spread on the table before him. (Real iron 16th-century shears are also here.) We seem to stand just across the table from him — perhaps a client, a watchful apprentice or a friend dropping in to gossip — and it’s clear we have interrupted him. He pauses — another of Moroni’s innovations is the portrait subject shown in suspended motion rather than in a static pose — and looks at us intently, leaving no doubt that he’ll soon return to his work.
Nearby, a portrait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria depicts a man holding a Greek statue of a small nude male torso. His bare forearm is extremely unusual for a secular portrait, although religious art bares plenty of flesh. The idea is taken to further extremes in the straining laborers and exposed limbs of Goya’s “The Forge” of 1815-20, which hangs in the Frick’s West Hall.
Another of Moroni’s innovations is the “sacred portrait,” and the three examples known to survive are united at the Frick for the first time. These paintings break with the tradition of depicting donors as minor characters within the religious artworks they commissioned. The donors have what these days is known as agency: They are now placed in real (if still painted) space, appearing as citizens of the world, unlike the smaller, flatter, spiritual creatures on whom they gaze.
The sacred portraits are no match for Moroni’s secular portraits. (For one thing, the donors almost never lock eyes with us.) But in them, Moroni shows off his ability to paint in two styles simultaneously, pays homage to his craft and also makes it clear where his loyalty lies.
Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture
Through June 2 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan; 212-288-0700, frick.org.
Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic, regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Her special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. More about Roberta Smith
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