Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

His refined and elegant paintings earned him the title of “Ferrarase Raphael”, while his suggestive chromatics bound to peculiar solid forms, defines his unmistakable figurative poetry. The leader of the golden period of the exempt patronage of the arts, Benvenuto Tisi or il Garofalo has the honour of baptising the Ermitage Italian Foundation. His exhibitions will be held in the Estense Castle in Ferrara with an event that will solemnly vouch for the artistic and cultural bonds between the city of Ferrara and Saint Petersburg museum.

 

A temporary exhibit for Garofalo has not yet been adequately researched in Italy and still it was exactly this artist – already defined as “modern” by Giorgio Vasari for his paintings and his lifestyle – who in many ways influenced the path followed by the local school in the first half of the fifteenth century. Il Garofalo thought outside the box and almost uniquely depicted altarpieces, on the table and not on a canvass, ordered almost exclusively by religious fraternal orders. Unlike his other contemporaries, who worked for the Ferrarese court, Garofalo distanced himself from the recreational and entertainment art favoured by the townspeople. He was an artist far from the trends and poetry of the time and always remained loyal to his typical stylistic code under the influence of Giorgione and Raffaello Sanzio. The exhibition will be held from 5^th April to 6^th July 2008, curated by Tatiana Kustodieva and Mauro Lucco in collaboration with Michele Danieli. Roughly 74 works (of which 6 are from other authors and therefore “comparative”) will be shown, equal to 40% of his entire artistic production. For the Ferrarese painter, his monographs are being shown for the first, and is thus verification for the number of pieces on exhibit.

“Garofalo. The Painter of the Este Court”, this is the title of the show, represented by the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, paying homage to the artist who promoted a certain taste for Ferrarase art in the whole of Europe and whose works were the first to cross the threshold of the Russian courts. His first work from the Italian Renaissance to be added to the Russian collection during the epoch of Peter the Great, and also wrongly attributed to Raphael was in fact “Deposition”. Thanks to the collaboration with the most important European institutions, many of his works that remain “dispersed” will finally be returned to the city of Estense, where they were conceived and where they will contribute to the sphere of renovation that characterised the duke in the last splendid century. “Desposition” will return along with three exceptional large format paintings executed by Garofalo in the 1430s for the lost convent of Saint Bernard: “Cana of Galileo’s wedding”, “Calvario’s Journey” and a mind-blowing “Allegory of the Old and the New Testament”.

The last painting is very interesting, not only because of its composition which is a kind of subjective al fresco analogous to that in the Ferrara Art Gallery, but also because for more than roughly fifty years, the work had remained rolled up. And it was only in 2007 after precise restoration that it was fully recuperated. For sure no one could doubt that the Ermitage would do great things even in its foreign “branches”. In fact, Saint Petersburg Museum has reached the point of organising a special flight to return to Italy a painting that is to this day conserved at the Museum of Fine Arts in the Far East in the small Siberian city of Khabarovsk. The painting is “The Multiplication of Bread and Fish”, both powerful and beautiful almost 3 meters high and 2.5 meters long and therefore too big to be transported by an airliner; away from Ferrara by now since 1792, previously joining the Papa Pio Vi collection and therefore voluntarily added to Russia in 1840 by Zar Nicola I.

From April 5^th to July 6th 2008

GAROFALO. PAINTER OF THE ESTE COURT

Castello Estense di Ferrara

Internet: www.mostragarofalo.it

Times: everyday from 9.30 to 19.30

Tickets: Full price: 10,00 euros; Reduced: 8,00 euros