BERGAMO. THE GREAT PAINTING BETWEEN LOTTO AND MORONI

Among the many wonders of Bergamo there are the splendid paintings that Lorenzo Lotto leaves after his stay in the city.
by Fabio Massimo Penna

Among the jewels of Bergamo, the Colleoni Chapel is definitely worth a visit, the tomb of the great leader Bartolomeo Colleoni to whom Verrocchio had dedicated the famous equestrian monument in Venice. The mausoleum is an architectural masterpiece by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, an architect also known for his interventions in the Certosa di Pavia. In the Colleoni Chapel, the Amadeo manages to combine the rigorous Renaissance scheme with a central plan with an abundance of Gothic-style decorative elements that embellish the polychrome facade. Brunelleschi's Florentine lesson is bent to the Lombard ornamental inclination. The architect from Pavia is also a sculptor and inside the chapel he created the funeral monument of Medea Colleoni with the recumbent figure of the daughter of the famous leader who "contrasts, for the finesse obtained with the pictorial modulation of the plastic planes, to the exuberance a bit heavy in the decoration of the sarcophagus ”(Piero Adorno - Adriana Mastrangelo, Dell'arte e degli Artisti - The Renaissance, G. D'Anna Publishing house, Florence, 2002). The facade of the chapel is a joyful ensemble of lively and chromatically brilliant elements that exhibits the pictorial language of the Lombard school.

Fundamental to the art of Bergamo is the stay in the city of the great Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, who lived in the center of Lombardy from 1513 to 1525. Absolute masterpiece of the great artist is the Pala Martinengo, preserved in the church of San Bartolomeo, characterized by extraordinary grandeur of the painted architecture with the barrel vaulted arch and the perspective escape of the columns converging at the vanishing point placed in coincidence with the belly of the Madonna, seated on a high base together with the Child. The characters surrounding the Virgin are arranged to accompany the escape of the columns and the open dome lets the light that bathes the figures emerge, making them emerge from the darkness of the apse. The Altarpiece of San Bernardino in Pignolo of the church of San Bernardino confirms the extraordinary mastery of perspective of the Venetian painter in the glimpses of the cloth above the Virgin and Child and of the angels holding the curtain. An angel intent on writing suddenly turns towards the visitor, involving him in the painting. The dark area due to the curtain hanging over the throne of the Madonna allows Lotto to graduate the chromatism of the work in transitions from light to dark shadow with soft intermediate changes.

The great sixteenth-century painter Giovanni Battista Moroni is of Bergamo origin. The artist earns immortal fame with his "portraits in action" in which he resumes the portrayed intent in their work activities, as in the famous The Tailor of the National Gallery in London in which the man is depicted with scissors in the act of cutting a piece of cloth. With this expedient the painter avoids the static nature of official portraits. The Bergamo aristocracy and upper middle class find their cantor in Moroni as shown in the Portrait of Antonio Navagero of the Milanese Pinacoteca di Brera in which the psychological study documents the religious rigor of the portrayed character. Bergamo preserves many works by his illustrious son such as the painting of the Knight in pink in Palazzo Moroni, The Baptism of Christ in the Adriano Bernareggi Museum and the Altarpiece of Santa Caterina in the Cathedral. The cathedral itself sees the intervention of the brilliant Florentine architect Antonio Averulino known as Filarete who conceives a longitudinal body, a Latin cross with a single nave with side chapels. Carlo Fontana, who was also papal architect in Rome, where he created the facade of the church of San Marcello al Corso, must later intervene on his project.

Another great genius from Bergamo is the sculptor Giacomo Manzù, one of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century. In San Pietro he created the Porta della Morte, in which an earthly death is affixed to the crucifixion of Christ and the death of the Virgin, which probably refers to the killing of the partisans by the fascists. Among his most famous works is the bronze statue of David, with which he departs from the traditional representation of the biblical hero, depicting him fragile and fearful in a crouching position. His Cardinals are also famous, sculptures that vary in size and materials (almost always in bronze but also in marble and alabaster).