Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection

July 6–December 18, 2011

In celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, we present Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection. This exhibition brings together striking works by Mannerist and Baroque artists, including Caravaggio, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giambattista Tiepolo, and Il Cavaliere d'Arpino, that reflect a vibrant range of artistic innovation from three of Italy's great cities.

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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Flying Female Figure, c. 1744; pen, ink, and wash on paper; 10 9/16 × 7 15/16 in.; museum purchase.

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Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection

July 6–December 18, 2011

When BAMPFA was founded in the mid-1960s, among the earliest and most important works acquired were paintings and works on paper by Italian artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These have remained enduring cornerstones of the collection. In celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, we present Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection. This exhibition brings together striking works by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giambattista Tiepolo, Carlo Maratta, Giovanni Caracciolo, and Giuseppe Cesari (called Il Cavaliere d'Arpino), among others, that reflect a vibrant range of artistic innovation from three of Italy's great cities. The works selected for this exhibition express the diversity of the Mannerist and Baroque eras. The Roman Mannerist artist D'Arpino, for example, was distinguished as a brilliant colorist, as is evident in his striking Judith with Head of Holofernes (1603–1606). For a short period in the early 1590s, D'Arpino employed the young Caravaggio, newly arrived in Rome, to paint flowers and fruit. Caracciolo, a Neapolitan follower of Caravaggio, helped to popularize the dramatic and naturalistic Caravaggesque style, as in The Young Saint John in the Wilderness (1610–1620). In the 1620s and 1630s, he contributed many important works to the churches of Naples. Nearly a century later in Venice, Tiepolo became renowned for his grand fresco paintings. In his large-scale commissioned works as well as his intimate drawings and studies, Tiepolo excelled at a luminosity and fluidity of color associated with the Venetian region. Flying Female Figure (c. 1744) is one of numerous drawings he carried out in preparation for his religious paintings. This simple, graceful ink-and-wash drawing does not definitively relate to a particular figure, but typifies Tiepolo's exquisitely concise draftsmanship and dramatic evocation of the human form in space.

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Rome, Naples, Venice: Italian Masterworks from the BAMPFA Collection

July 6–December 18, 2011

Selected Exhibition Objects

Print

Titian

Agostino Carracci

Drawing

Saint Transported on a Cloud

Sebastiano (formerly attributed to) Ricci

Painting

The Young Saint John in the Wilderness

Giovanni Caracciolo

Print

The Denial of St. Peter

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

Print

The Finding of the Bodies of Saints Peter and Paul

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione

Drawing

Study for Saint Charles Borromeo

Carlo Maratti

Painting

Judith with Head of Holofernes

Giuseppe Cesari

Print

Series of Galleries with Round Arches and a Crane-like Structure in Right Foreground, plate XI, from Carceri (Prisons)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Drawing

Flying Female Figure

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Print

Veduta dell' Anticeatro Flavio, detto il Colosseo

Giovanni Battista Piranesi