Bergamo Comes to Manhattan

Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

'The Stoning of Saint Stephen' by Lorenzo Lotto.

New York

Bellini, Titian, and Lotto:

North Italian Paintings From the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Through Sept. 3

Bergamo, Italy, is enchanting. Home of the commedia dell'arte and birthplace of Gaetano Donizetti, it's notable today for its blissfully car-free cittá alta, a perfect miniature medieval and Renaissance hilltown, above the Lombard plain, complete with castle, 16th-century walls built by the Venetians, and a superb piazza. There's also a quattrocento jewel box of a funerary chapel built by Bartolomeo Colleoni, the mercenary soldier and later Captain General of the Venetian Republic, for himself and his family—a supplement to the iconic commemorative equestrian statue by Andrea Verrocchio in Venice.

Lower Bergamo is larger and more modern. The draw here, in addition to a handsome 16th- to 18th-century old quarter, is the Accademia Carrrara, founded in the 18th century by a passionate, civic-minded collector and enriched in the 19th century by two others, one of them the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, whose "scientific" method of scrutinizing works of art taught generations of art historians, including Bernard Berenson, how to identify the "hands" of particular artists. The museum's outstanding collection of Renaissance art from Venice, Lombardy and Florence reflects the exacting eyes, the sense of purpose and the taste of the founders, who were acutely aware of Bergamo's unique heritage as an outpost of the Venetian Republic close to Milan. An appetite for North Italian realism was part of the local tradition, but so was enthusiasm for the opulence of Venice.

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Now, Bergamo has come to Manhattan. The Accademia Carrara is closed for restoration, so 15 of its masterworks by Venetian and North Italian artists, painted roughly between 1450 and 1550—Bergamo's "Golden Age"—are on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in "Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings From the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo." It's a spectacular little show.

Every work is noteworthy, whether by an acclaimed master or a less familiar but equally accomplished artist. The celebrated Venetian Giovanni Bellini's early, half-length "Pietá With the Virgin and Saint John" (c. 1455-60) transforms the iconography of a Byzantine icon into an intensely felt, wiry, meticulously rendered study of grief and reminds us of the artist's close connection, in the first part of his career, with his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. Equally compelling is "The Three Crosses" (1450 or 1456) by Vincenzo Foppa, who came from nearby Brescia but worked mostly in Milan; this astonishing picture makes us beholders, on an up-to-the-minute classical loggia, contemplating a spatially articulate crucified Christ between the two thieves, bathed in eerie light, against a strangely schematic landscape.

The selection's Titian, "Orpheus and Eurydice" (c. 1508-12), while not universally accepted as by his hand, is plausibly presented here as a very early work, when the youthful artist was under the influence of Giorgione. In the foreground of a fantastic landscape, Eurydice is bitten by what appears to be a miniature dragon. Further back, Orpheus starts turning to gaze, fatally, at his beloved as he leads her out of Hades—here dark, satanic mills, probably inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's nocturnal fire scenes, recently installed in Venice—while Eurydice begins to slip back into the underworld. This fraught moment is presented inventively, although the picture is so embrowned by time (or obscured by darkened varnish) that it's difficult to form a real opinion.

Artists from Bergamo and its region often learned their craft in La Serenissima and the influence of Venetian art is palpable in their work. Bellini's prototypes inform a "Madonna and Child" (c. 1520) by Andrea Previtali that was commissioned by Paolo Cassotti, the richest merchant in the city. In a dramatic reversal of protocol, Cassotti and his wife, Agnese, are presented head-on, standing closer to the Virgin and Child than their patron saints, who face away from us. In 1520, as today, access could be bought. Titian's approach to portraiture haunts a pair of marvelous paintings by Giovanni Battista Moroni (whom Titian is said to have admired). A shrewd young man, painted in 1567, stares appraisingly; a self-possessed, opulently dressed, bejeweled little girl, painted about 1570, fixes us with wide gray eyes.

Lorenzo Lotto is the star of the show, even in this splendid company—a deserved distinction, since the Venetian-trained painter worked in Bergamo for more than a decade. The exhibition's three large predella panels (narrative images placed below an altarpiece) by Lotto, painted in 1513-1516, were enormously influential on local artists, as was the monumental devotional painting to which they originally belonged, made for Bergamo's church of San Bartolomeo.

It's easy to see why. The dramatic moments depicted in the predelle—one of St. Dominic's miracles, the Entombment, and the stoning of St. Stephen—are staged with clarity, elegance and maximum emotional intensity. The firmly modeled, variously costumed protagonists of the narratives move easily in space. Each embodies a particular inner state, from the worried relative of the mortally wounded man whom St. Dominic revives; to the swooning Madonna, recoiling from the body of her dead son; to the anguished, calm St. Stephen, praying in the face of martyrdom. And that's not to mention the classical harmony of Stephen's nude limbs escaping his concealing cloak. The martyred saint's attackers—bending, stretching and turning balletically as they hurl their massive stones—diagram the space of the picture so powerfully that it almost counteracts the gruesome subject. All this: lush Venetian color; poetic landscape and architectural backgrounds; and Lotto's own unmistakable quirkiness, which he apparently cultivated to separate himself from his Venetian colleagues. It's the next best thing to a trip to Bergamo.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

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