Moroni Exhibition at the Frick Gallery

Just a few more days to catch the great Giovanni Battista Moroni exhibition at the Frick Gallery…

We hear sometimes of the “Catholic cultures” of the past – indeed, some fancy recreating one. But what exactly is such a culture? Is it not an all-embracing sensibility or “atmosphere” – present everywhere, yet not visible anywhere (as someone said of the hand of a great artist in his works)?  Moroni is a case in point. His main achievements are secular portraits – his religious works, still found mainly in the churches where he painted them, are said to be less successful. Further, Moroni’s world is restricted to Bergamo and its surroundings. Bergamo was one of the smaller – but not insignificant – Italian cities of that era (the middle of the 16th century)  Moroni’s world was that of the Council of Trent and the Battle of Lepanto, of Charles V and Philip II, of the last years of Michelangelo and Titian, of St Francis Xavier and St. Ignatius Loyola, of Tasso and Palestrina.

Moroni portrayed aristocrats, artisans (famously, a tailor), scholars and clergy. There are both beautiful, gorgeously attired women – who happened to be eminent poets in several languages – and an old widow, the patroness of a convent. About these people are the attributes of their status: the armor and swords of the soldier, the books of the scholar, the shears of the tailor, the dazzling garments of the aristocratic women. At times the references are mysterious: broken walls and statuary allude to some unknown event in the life of one sitter. Yet these images are all of real individuals who play a variety of specific public roles in their society. Need I say that men and women are clearly differentiated? All in complete contrast to the “gender-bending” images the media constantly thrust upon us. Indeed, recently we see in our local press women imitating men who have imitated women.….

It seems that in his day and later critical opinion looked down on Moroni as too “documentarian” or merely realistic. After all, wasn’t he competing with the painterly style of Titian and the deliberately artificial and expressive images of the Mannerists? Perhaps his art was the equivalent in painting of the realistic novel, only 250-300 years too early. But in truth, Moroni was in no way a mere photographic copyist of external reality.  For one thing, his paintings so often display a fine insight into the sitter’s character. Do we not detect a hint of a sneer on the face of one elegantly clad young lady (above)? And is there not great spiritual tranquility and religious faith depicted on the features of an aged widow? Indeed, is not the painting of such a face – not superficially beautiful at all – a subject highly original in female portraiture? 

Furthermore, in one important respect Moroni does venture into the explicitly religious. We are familiar with the depictions of donors in late medieval and renaissance painting – often shown in miniature compared to the major sacred actors. Moroni, however, is said to have created a new type of image, wherein full-sized images of the donors pray before or gaze upon a smaller scale devotional scene in the background. The curators of the exhibition trace this new style of representing the donors and their faith to the influence of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola – just then gaining prominence in the Catholic world.  For St Ignatius also emphasized forming an interior image of a sacred subject as an aid to meditation and prayer.

Working within the confines of the portrait, does not Moroni display a Christian culture as fully developed as that of the masters of the explicitly religious art of his time? Does he not show us – of course without any notion of propagandizing or arguing – what one such Christian culture could be like? And is not such a faithful recorder of his time perhaps a more accessible guide for us than those contemporaries of Moroni who left us grand and ecstatic religious images?

For more details see HERE. The exhibition closes June 2.