BOLOGNA LA DOTTA. ARTISTIC JOURNEY AMONG THE FELSINE MASTERPIECES

Home to the oldest university in the world, Bologna satisfies the visitor's hunger for beauty with a series of extraordinary artistic masterpieces.

by Fabio Massimo Penna

For the tourist who arrives in Bologna, the temptations are many: good food, the friendliness of the inhabitants, the feeling that in this city people really know how to enjoy life. But there is also culture, a lot of culture in Bologna la Dotta (his is considered the oldest university in the world). Among the numerous beauties of the city, the absolute masterpiece by Niccolò Dell'Arca deserves to be admired: the sculptural group of the Lamentation over Christ in the Church of Santa Maria della Vita. These are seven terracotta statuettes (originally polychrome) among which the famous “screaming Marie” stand out. The expressionistic power of the group is extraordinary with the distorted expressions and theatrical gestures of women desperate at the sight of the lifeless body of Jesus. The agitated movements and the shocked features of the characters refer to the stylistic option that, in nearby Ferrara, the masters of “Ferrarese workshop”, Cosmè Tura, Francesco Del Cossa and Ercole De 'Roberti.

It seems that during his stay in Bologna Michelangelo was struck by the vision of the tiles made by Jacopo Della Quercia for the facade of San Petronio. In fact, the mighty physical structure that connotes the sculptures and figures painted by Buonarroti echo the raised and powerful volume of Adam and Eve sculpted in the panels of the portal of the Bolognese cathedral by the artist from Siena. The aforementioned Niccolò Dell'Arca himself refers us to Michelangelo: the two artists created some of the sculptures of the Ark of San Domenico in the church of the same name. The Tuscan sculptor made three marble statuettes (San Procolo, an angel and San Petronio) while among the sixteen sculpted by Niccolò we remember those of Sant'Agricola and San Vitale. To complete the ark there is the sarcophagus made by Nicola Pisano with the help of Arnolfo da Cambio.

We have mentioned a building that marks the history of Bologna, the church of San Petronio (we recall in this regard the lyric by Giosuè Carducci In the square of San Petronio). One of the most important and expert local architects, Antonio di Vincenzo, is called to direct the work for the construction of the Basilica. With a Gothic layout but contaminated by clear spatiality and powerful Renaissance plasticity, San Petronio shows an essential and rigorous geometric structure. If the exterior has an incomplete cladding, the interior exhibits a remarkable compactness, despite the interventions in different periods, with an accentuated vertical momentum balanced by the longitudinal development of the deep naves. As already mentioned, the façade is embellished by the intervention of Jacopo Della Quercia with the bas-reliefs of the stories of the genesis on the side pillars and the statues of the Virgin and Child and those of Sant'Ambrogio and San Petronio contained within the lunette of the portal.

Palazzo Fava exhibits the paintings of the three Carraccis (Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico), some of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century: "Ludovico and Annibale increasingly get rid of all academic dross, and in many panels they stage a completely new and unexpected, really with curious eyes open to the truth ”(Eugenio Riccòmini, L'arte a Bologna, Editoriale rl, Bologna, 2003). The Carracci Bolognese, especially Annibale, initiate the Caravaggesque revolution which provides for the abolition of all embellishments in favor of a crude and truthful representation of reality: the masterpieces of Annibale La macelleria (Oxford, Crist Church) and The bean eater ( Rome, Galleria Colonna). The three Carracci cousins enliven the Bolognese cultural environment by founding the Accademia dei Desiderosi, which will later be called the Accademia degli Incamminati, a private institution where a return to painting the true natural is proposed, both theoretically and practically. . The presence of the Carraccis is also conspicuous in the National Picture Gallery of Bologna, with the Assumption of the Virgin and Madonna in Glory with the Child and Saints of Hannibal, Martyrdom of Sant'Orsola and San Leonardo, Sermon by the Baptist and Probatic swimming pool of Ludovico and Communion of San Girolamo di Agostino.

Another great Bolognese artist of the seventeenth century is Guido Reni. Reni opts for a painting linked to classical beauty because he believed that from the chaotic vastness of reality only what is beautiful should be extracted and that the artist should strive for an ideal beauty. Endowed by nature with an extraordinary skill in drawing, the Bolognese artist took advantage of his stays in Rome to study ancient art and to bathe in the source of Raphael's extraordinary and sweet painting. His masterpieces such as the victorious Samson and The Massacre of the Innocents are preserved in the National Art Gallery of Bologna.

The great Bolognese pictorial tradition continues in the eighteenth century with the figure of Giuseppe Maria Crespi (author of the amusing La flce degli Uffizi and the seven sacraments of the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden), of which one can admire in the Emilian city Shelves with musical books located in the Giovanni Battista Martini Music Conservatory, culminating in the twentieth century with the extraordinary personality of Giorgio Morandi, whose still lifes with bottles have become a classic of Italian art. His theory of variation in repetition leads him to create paintings in which the different dispositions of the bottles and the chromatic changes allow to iterate the subject derived from tradition. Deeply tied to the Emilian land, Morandi has portrayed Bologna and nearby Grizzana in numerous landscapes. Tourists who go to the city of Bologna are advised to visit the Morandi Museum which, in addition to the works, exhibits a precise reconstruction of the famous studio in via Fondazza in which numerous masterpieces were born.