Abstract
The ambitious exhibition ‘Mantegna and Bellini’ was held in London at the National Gallery from October 2018 to January 2019. Tracing the career of the two artists, it displayed, over six rooms, a large number of paintings and drawings, following a chronological structure. The main curatorial strategy consisted in juxtaposing paintings of similar content in order to compare and contrast the different styles and iconological concerns of the two artists. Despite the exhibition’s potential, however, its art historical scope remained restrictive: captions insisted on questions of attribution and patronage, constantly referring to nebulous canons of renaissance ‘beauty’. Such perspective, eventually, seemed to reinforce a problematic rhetoric of intellectualism rather than expanding the artworks’ interpretative possibilities.
Highlights
Andrea Mantegna (1431 – 1506) and Giovanni Bellini (1433 – 1516) are influential and celebrated personalities of early modern Northern Italian art
John the Baptist displayed in the same room, whose figures emerge from choreographed darkness as they approach the candle
Audio-guides are provided, but textual explanations are omitted from the exhibition space, which can be experienced as an early modern gallery
Summary
Andrea Mantegna (1431 – 1506) and Giovanni Bellini (1433 – 1516) are influential and celebrated personalities of early modern Northern Italian art. The juxtaposition of Caravaggio’s St. Jerome and Serodine’s St. Peter Reading is even more striking. Despite the similarity of the composition, Serodine’s painting is built from thick impasto and heavy brushstrokes, which create a warm and glimmering ambience.
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