Raphael is the protagonist of the 2018 season of events in Bergamo, with over 60 strikingly-arranged works featured in the exhibition Raffaello e l’eco del mito, anticipating the celebrations planned in 2020 for the anniversary of the 500 years since the artist’s death.
One of the paintings on view is San Sebastiano, a masterpiece by the young Raphael now in the Accademia Carrara’s collections. The exhibition illustrates Raphael’s training, career and influences in detail, as well as exploring his huge popularity from the 19th century onwards, when this painting first arrived in Bergamo.
The exhibition opens with an investigation into Raphael’s cultural roots during his early years, spent largely in Urbino, Perugia and Siena. The climate of the Montefeltro court in Urbino and the artist’s ability to absorb the ideas of other painters and from classical art, and how he elaborated on them to develop his own very personal language and superb style, are explored through the works of his father, Giovanni Santi, and those of Pedro Berruguete, Perugino and Pintoricchio, all compared to fifteen works by Raphael himself from national and international museums.
The fascinating theme of Raphael’s unparalleled success in the 19th century is dealt with in the second segment of the exhibition. The arrival of the San Sebastiano in the collection of Guglielmo Lochis in 1836 coincided with a renewed interest in Raphael the man and the artist, fuelled on the one hand by the rediscovery of his mortal remains in the Pantheon in 1833 and on the other by a renewed interest in the mysterious figure of La Fornarina. Around this masterpiece the works of Anthon Raphael Mengs, Peter Cornelius, Felice Schiavoni and others document the consolidation of Raphael’s reputation in the 19th century.
Interest in Raphael has been a constant from the 19th century down to the present day. De Chirico and Picasso, Luigi Ontani and Giulio Paolini, Vanessa Beecroft and Francesco Vezzoli are just some of the artists who have measured themselves with Raphael and his legend in ways ranging from reuse to citation and from deference to devotion, all demonstrating how relevant this extraordinary painter from Urbino is in today’s contemporary world.
The Bergamo exhibition has gathered a number of prestigious loans from Italian and international museums, from the Uffizi in Florence to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Bode Museum in Berlin, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Louvre in Paris.