Caravaggio - between Rome and Milan

Last year many exhibitions have been organized all over Italy to celebrate the fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death, including the solo exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale, where majors artworks of Caravaggio were on display.

This year in contemporaneousness, Rome and Milan have something new to display:

Palazzo Venezia in ROME will show the results of the x-ray carried out on the three paintings of the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi: Martyrdom of St Matthew, Call of St Matthew, and St Matthew and the Angel. 

The results of these exams are extraordinary, they show the techniques used by Caravaggio, his pentimenti and the compositional changes.  

Particular in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

The exhibition is in:

Palazzo Venezia, 

Via del Plebiscito 118,

10 March -15 October 2011

MILAN, instead, will  present an exhibition on "Gli occhi di Caravaggio" at the Museo Diocesano curated by Vittorio Sgarbi.

This new exhibition illustrates the birth of the genius Caravaggio. Reconstructing his artistic training, from Simone Peterzano to the Veneto and Lombard masters, this fascinating show examines the precursors and contemporaries of Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), highlighting the works that the artist would actually have seen and what he would have witnessed in the artistic climate that dominated the area from Venice to Milan before he moved to Rome, which according to the most recent studies was likely to have been around 1595-96.

The exhibition gathers around sixty masterpieces by the greatest painters of the day, including Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Lorenzo Lotto, Jacopo da Bassano, Moretto da Brescia, Giovan Battista Moroni, Gerolamo Savoldo, Vincenzo and Antonio Campi, Giovanni Ambrogio Figino, Simone Peterzano, and many more, some of which have never been exhibited before, document the formation of a groundbreaking aesthetic and an innovative conception of the human figure and its relationship with space and light, which was fundamental to the development of the young Merisi.

Naturally Caravaggio himself could not left out, and the exhibition includes some extremely significant works. One of these is the so-called “Murtola Medusa”, the first version of the famous shield in the Uffizi Galleries, which takes its name from the poet who wrote a poem about it in 1600.

This work, which has always belonged to a private collection, was created by Caravaggio in 1596 and can be viewed as emblematic of his formative years, in particular due to the under drawing which was brought to light by recent in depth scientific investigations. The same techniques have been used to date the shield to between 1596 and 1597, the period when Caravaggio moved to Rome. Conceptually speaking, in this way the Murtola Medusa closes the painter’s Lombard period and opens the Roman one, when, as Vittorio Sgarbi recalls: “he suddenly transformed everything, to the point that the shock waves of his revolution reached the whole of Europe, and there was not one great painter who did not come from France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands to see what Caravaggio had done”.

The exhibition is in:

Museo Diocesano from 11 March to 3 July 2011.

SO IF YOU GO TO ITALY, YOU CAN CHOOSE BETWEEN ROME AND MILAN!!

Buon proseguimento!!