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Giovanni Battista Moroni
Giovanni Battista Moroni
	Giovanni Battista Moroni, in a sculpture by Giuseppe Siccardi
Born	Giovanni Battista Moroni; c. 1520-1524; Albino, near Bergamo
Died	February 5, 1578; Albino, near Bergamo
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Painting
Movement	Mannerism

Giovanni Battista Moroni (c. 1520-1524^[1]– 5 February 1578) was an Italian painter of the Mannerism. He also is called Giambattista Moroni. Best known for his elegantly realistic portraits of the local nobility and clergy, he is considered one of the great portrait painters of the Cinquecento.

Biography

Moroni was the son of architect Andrea Moroni. He trained under Alessandro Bonvicino in Brescia, where he was the main studio assistant during the 1540s, and worked in Trento, Bergamo and his home town of Albino, near Bergamo, where he was born and died. His two short periods in Trento coincided with the first two sessions of the Council of Trent, 1546–48 and 1551–53. On both occasions Moroni painted a number of religious works (including the altarpiece of the Doctors of the Church for the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo) as well as the series of portraits for which he is remembered.

During his stay in Trento he also made contact with Titian and the Count-Bishop, Cristoforo Madruzzo, whose own portrait is by Titian, but for whom Moroni painted portraits of Madruzzo's sons.^[2] There were nineteenth-century claims that he was trained by Titian at Trento, however, it is improbable that he ever ventured to the Venetian's studio for long, if at all. Moroni's period as the fashionable portraitist of Bergamo, nowhere documented but in the inscribed dates of his portraits, is unexpectedly condensed, spanning only the years ca. 1557–62, after which Bergamo was convulsed in internecine strife and Moroni retired permanently to Albino, (Rossi, Gregori et al.) where, in his provincial isolation, he was entirely overlooked by Giorgio Vasari. His output at Bergamo, influenced in part by study of the realism of Savoldo, produced in the few years a long series of portraits that, while not quite heroic, are full of dignified humanity and grounded in everyday life. The subjects are not drawn exclusively from the Bergamasque aristocracy, but from the newly self-aware class of scholars, professionals, and exemplary government bureaucrats, with a few soldiers, presented in detached and wary attitudes with Moroni's meticulous passages of still life and closer attention to textiles and clothing than to psychological penetration.

His output of religious paintings, destined for a less sophisticated audience in the local sub-Alpine valleys, was smaller and less successful than his portraits: "the exact truth of parts nowhere added up, in his altar pictures, even to the semblance of credibility", S. J. Freedberg has observed of their diagrammatic schemes borrowed from Moretto, Savoldo, and others.^[3] for example, he painted a Last Supper for the parish at Romano in Lombardy; Coronation of the Virgin in Sant'Alessandro della Croce, Bergamo; also for the cathedral of Verona, SS Peter and Paul, and in the Brera of Milan, the Assumption of the Virgin. Moroni was engaged upon a Last Judgment in the church of Gorlago, when he died. Overall, his style in these paintings shows influences of his master, Lorenzo Lotto, and Girolamo Savoldo. Giovanni Paolo Cavagna was an undistinguished pupil of Moroni, however, it is said that in following generations, his insightful portraiture influenced Fra' Galgario and Pietro Longhi.

Freedberg notes that while his religious canvases are "archaic", recalling the additive compositions of the late Quattrocento and show stilted unemotive saints, his portraits are remarkable for their sophisticated psychological insight, dignified air, fluent control, and exquisite silvery tonality. Patrons for religious art were not interested in an individualized, expressive "Madonna", they desired numinous archetypal saints. On the other hand, patrons were interested in the animated portraiture.

Public collections with works by Moroni

The National Gallery (London) has one of the best collections of his work, including the celebrated portrait known as Il sarto (The Tailor). Other portraits are found in the Uffizi (the Nobleman Pointing to Flame inscribed, "Et quid volo nisi ut ardeat?"), Berlin Gallery, the Canon Ludovico de' Terzi and Moroni's self-portrait; and in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., A Gentleman in Adoration Before the Madonna,^[4] the full-length portrait of Gian Federico Madruzzo,^[5] and the seated half-figure of the Jesuit Ercole Tasso, traditionally called, "Titian's Schoolmaster",^[6] although there is no real connection with Titian.

Among the public collections holding works by Giovanni Battista Moroni are, the Accademia Carrara (Bergamo) (Portrait of an old man), Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford), Brooks Museum of Art (Memphis, Tennessee), Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hermitage Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Liechtenstein Museum (Vienna), the Musée du Louvre, Musée Condé Chantilly (Chantilly, France), Museo Poldi Pezzoli (Milan), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Galleries of Scotland, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Canada (Portrait of a Man),^[7] the National Gallery, London, the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, California), Pinacoteca Ambrosiana (Milan), Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan), Rijksmuseum, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, Florida), Studio Esseci (Padua, Italy), University of Arizona Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Ireland (Portrait of a Gentleman and his two Children), the Uffizi (Portrait of Giovanni Antonio Pantera), the Prado (A Soldier),^[8] and the Worcester Art Museum (Portrait of a Man).^[9]

In 2016, "Portrait of a Man", attributed to the workshop of Giovanni Battista Moroni, was restituted to the heirs of Dr. August Liebmann Mayer. The painting had been looted by the Nazis, returned to France and in storage at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1951.^[10]

Gallery

Portrait of a Man, oil on canvas, 1553, Honolulu Museum of Art
Portrait of Bartolomeo Bonghi, oil on canvas, 1553, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gian Lodovico Madruzzo - Art Institute of Chicago
Portrait of Angelica Agliardi de Nicolini, circa 1560, Chantilly, Musée Condé
Portrait by Moroni, 1560, the background is very typical
Portrait of a Man Holding a Letter (L'Avvocato)
The Baptism of Christ with a Donor
Portrait of Don Gabriel de la Cueva, 1560, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
The Knight in Black, c. 1567, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan
Titian's Schoolmaster, c. 1575, National Gallery of Art
Portrait of a Soldier, c. 1560, Prado Museum, Madrid

References and sources

References

^ Rossetti (1911) placed his birth date around 1510; Freedberg states he was born c. 1523, while the Bergamo exhibition gives the range 1520-1524.
^ They are at the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
^ Freedberg 1993:593.
^ "A Gentleman in Adoration before the Madonna". National Gallery of Art - Collections. 3 September 1560. Retrieved 28 June 2019.
^ "Gian Federico Madruzzo". National Gallery of Art - Collections. 3 September 1560. Retrieved 28 June 2019.
^ "Titian's Schoolmaster". National Gallery of Art. 3 September 1575. Retrieved 28 June 2019.
^ https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=12770 ^{[bare URL]}
^ "A Soldier - The Collection - Museo Nacional del Prado". www.museodelprado.es. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
^ The old monographs on Moroni by D. Cugini Moroni Pittore (Bergamo) 1939 and G. Lendorff Giovanni Battista Moroni Il Ritrattista Bergamasco (Bergamo) 1939 have been superseded; archival notices concerning the painter and the modern catalogue raisonné is in Mina Gregori, Giovanni Battista Moroni: tutte le opere (Bergamo) 1979; two exhibitions have renewed interest in Moroni: Francesco Rossi, Mina Gregori et al., Giovan Battista Moroni (Bergamo exhibition catalogue), and Peter Humfrey, Giovanni Battista Moroni: Renaissance Portraitist (Fort Worth: Kimball Art Museum) 2000, the catalogue record of an exhibition of ten portraits at the Kimball (February–May 2000), with essays that set Moroni in the cultural history of his time.
^ Quito, Anne (5 May 2015). "A 17th-century painting looted by the Nazis was returned to its owner today". Quartz. Retrieved 2022-02-09.

Sources

Freedberg, S.J. (1993). Painting in Italy 1500–1600. 3rd ed. 1993. Yale University Press. pp. 591–95.
Gregori, Mina. Giovan Battista Moroni—tutte le opere. Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 1979.
Ng, Aimee, Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino. Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture. Exh. cat. Feb. 29–June 2, 2019. New York: The Frick Collection, 2019. (review with excerpts and images, Delancy Place, July 12, 2019)
Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Moroni, Giambattista" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 18 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 861.
Tiraboschi, Giampiero. Giovan Battista Moroni: l'uomo e l'artista. Bergamo: Tera mata, 2016.
Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). "Art and Architecture Italy, 1600–1750". Pelican History of Art. 1980. London: Penguin Books. pp. 591–595.