A
world of tramps and scoundrels, miserable and beggars, wanderers and mendicants,
meets us in these days at Brescia. Third world outcasts knocking at the
Padania welfare ? Or the recall
of the helpful ladies toward the needs of the underprivileged? Nothing at
all. The unbecoming and yelling mob, ragged and coarse, that meets us in
the recently renewed halls of the Santa Giulia Museum, is the theme of the
first extensive exhibition dedicated to an underestimated for a long time
painting genre, the painting
with genre scenes, precisely, or better, in this specific extent, that trend,
fascinating and still unexplored, dedicated to the most humble and popular
aspect of reality. A trend that had great successful in Italy between the
XVII and the XVIII century and that boasts, besides few known masters, properly
reassessed just this occasion, masterpieces of Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa,
Alessandro Magnasco, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Gaspare Traversi.
| Giovan Battista Carlone "The
tramps company" (first half '600) Private collection
Giuseppe Gambarini "Winter
allegory " (first half '700) Bologna, National picture gallery
Giovanni Michele Graneri "Market
scene" (first half '700) Private collection
Bernardo Strozzi "The cook
" (half '600) Genova, Red Palace Gallery
Giacomo Ceruti "Working women
" (first half '700) Brescia, Civic Museums
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Ideated by Francesco
Porzio and the late Federico Zeri, the exhibition is not limited nevertheless
to line up a series of exceptional paintings about the theme of pauperism
and lower classes, but gives a very high level framing not only by the point
of view of history and art but also a wider historical and sociological
key. Even if looked at with a certain mistrust by the professional historians,
the figurative text
is in fact an extraordinary instrument of knowledge and learning, and often
offers about a world, an age or a society, more enlightening data than any
reconstruction carried out by the means of dusty archive documents . So
this humble and poor human being talks to us meaningfully, and in terms
still very actual, about the relationship between high and low culture ,
the behaviour of the affluent classes toward the world of the underprivileged,
about the way the attention to derelicts evolves from a generic interpretation,
carnival and caricature kind, toward an ambivalent feeling, of repugnance
and irony, fear and pity to finally flow into a substantial acceptance of
the human  dignity
of the poor and into a more sharing description of their real life conditions.
The exposition of Brescia records all the stages of this evolution starting
from the sixteenth-century precedents, wherein the attention to the popular
themes makes its way beside the traditional religious iconography finally
relegating it in a second row, and finishing with Giacomo Ceruti, the great
eighteenth century painter, Milanese by birth but who grew at Brescia ,
able to give complete autonomy and truth to the poor world “. With Ceruti,
the so called 'genre' painting, that still at the Caravaggio's times were
considered inferior as regards to the religious and historical painting,
appears already without comic, grotesque or moralising features and with
his clear and pure adhesion to the humbles world he opens the door to the
modern realism. |
