THE MAN WHO MADE MODERN PAINTING.MORONI
I
t is hard to believe that there are any painters of genius still ripe for rediscovery, in this country at least, but so it seems with the elusive 16th-century Italian portraitist Giovanni Battista Moroni. A discreet and watchful figure, Moroni spent most of his 30-year career in the northern town of Bergamo painting the people around him, from the doctors, clerics and craftsmen to the politicians, poets and aristocrats. His psychological insights are strikingly acute, his portraits of men, women and children alive with human presence. A hundred books could not give us a better sense of the characters of this little world – beyond which Moroni (and most of his paintings) never travelled, which may be one reason he has never received his due praise.
Moroni’s most famous painting, The Tailor (1570), ought to be world-famous by now, and it feels like an extraordinarily lucky strike that it happens to belong to our National Gallery. The tailor stands in the silvery shadows of his workshop, shears in hand, about to cut his cloth, looking up from his work with a gaze of steady intent. We see him and he sees us: the mutual exchange is startling and immediate (think of Velázquez, but almost a century in advance). This is who he is, what he does, where he works, how he reacts to others: an exemplary moment from the life held intact down the centuries.
The Duke of Albuquerque is a man on edge. Boxed into a corner of some cold stone palace, he is tensely flexed for any hostile action. One hand grasps the ledge behind him, thumb hovering on the hilt of his sword, the other holds tight to his purse. If you did not know it from the hint of hypertension in the flushed cheeks, or the defensive narrowing of the eyes, you might guess he was hot-tempered and defiant. And everything in Moroni’s fine and subtle brushwork – from the almost-sneer of the mouth to the dapper, head-in-air erectness of the figure – is borne out by the motto inscribed on the wall beside the duke. Me? I’m afraid of nothing, not even death.The encounter is close and intense; there appears to be no psychological distance between the tailor, his painter and their viewer. And it turns out from this tremendous show at the Royal Academy, which includes many privately owned pictures never seen in public before, that this is Moroni’s singular gift. His portraits stage each figure as a solo performance; they have the time-stopping intimacy of soliloquies.
Moroni was the son of a mason and he loves to position a figure beside a pillar, ivy-clad wall or classical ruin. The cockiest of heroes may have a backdrop of crumbling masonry: life surrounded by the ravages of time. In the full-length portrait called A Knight With His Jousting Helmet, the eponymous gallant leans languidly against a huge chunk of stone, armour strewn around his feet, as if to suggest that the battle is done and dusted. But weeds are sprouting around him and the masonry is streaked with brown damp.
The knight will soon become involved in a murder plot between two aristocratic families; in exile from Bergamo, he will die by falling down a well when drunk. There are stories behind Moroni’s portraits – beautifully conveyed at the Royal Academy – but there are narratives within them too. The woman in scarlet silk holds a loving letter from her husband; the man in black holds his latest solemn essay. A monk, briefly appearing before Moroni, gives a faint half-smile, the measure of both his shyness and his daring.
There are books, manuscripts and epigrams everywhere; Moroni’s portraits are full of writers and readers. A woman leans urgently forward in her chair to address us: she is a poet. An old man in a beret 
and heavy jacket turns slowly from the leather-bound volume he has been reading to meet the viewer’s eye. His gaze is almost hypnotic, hooking you with a long and searching look. A man in a void, surrounded by nothing but the diaphanous shadow that seems to express his own stern charisma – Moroni’s portrait anticipates many artists to come, from Velázquez to Manet and Degas.
and heavy jacket turns slowly from the leather-bound volume he has been reading to meet the viewer’s eye. His gaze is almost hypnotic, hooking you with a long and searching look. A man in a void, surrounded by nothing but the diaphanous shadow that seems to express his own stern charisma – Moroni’s portrait anticipates many artists to come, from Velázquez to Manet and Degas.
Moroni was one of the first Italian artists to paint life size portraits at full length, but for less wealthy clients he produced smaller pictures of heads with no loss of power. He worked directly from the life without any preliminary drawing – unusual at the time, and for which Titian himself commended Moroni – and that sense of encounter is inherent in each image. A child gives the painter a candidly inquisitive stare as he works away at the canvas; a duchess turns her full hauteur upon him, suspicious and evidently impatient to be done with the session.
A particularly touching triple portrait shows a young widower trying to manage two jobs at once as he sits for Moroni – holding his own formal pose before the artist and at the same time reaching out as a father to gather his little children into the frame all together.
It is no insult to Moroni – the opposite, in fact – to say that his studio eventually has something in common with a photo booth in which sitters come to show an infinite variety of eyes and faces to the rival lens before them. Partly that comes from his Holbein-like precision of line, and his heightened naturalism. But in later life (not that we know quite when Moroni died: it may have been 1579 or 1580) he drops the background context so that the focus falls entirely and intensively on the individual.
Heads tilt and turn, eyes crease, contract, open wide with fascination, grow moist with too much staring; a frown gives way to sober restraint, an anxious glance to a warm-hearted nod of acknowledgement. Walk through this show and the citizens of Bergamo gather around you – vital, alert, each with his or her unique inner self, expression and stance, freshly present in Moroni’s exceptional portraits. This is the kind of painted miracle that so many artists would aim for in the centuries to come: nothing less than the tangible embodiment of human nature.
Two households, both alike in dignity/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene/ From ancient grudge break to new mutiny/ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”
The first words of the prologue of Romeo and Juliet deftly fill in the backstory of the tragedy we are about to see. In a provincial Italian city, two noble families pursue a blood feud that will result in the murders of kinsmen on both sides and ultimately to the exile of the hero and deaths of the young lovers. The Montagues and the Capulets are fictional, but murderous vendettas between noble families in the Renaissance certainly were not. Shakespeare’s source for his play was the retelling in English of Italian novellas published in the 1560s. But is it possible that the novellas themselves were based on historical fact?
The question haunted me as I walked through the Royal Academy’s sublime exhibition of the 16th century Italian master Giovanni Battista Moroni, the first ever held in this country. If you know his work at all it is because around the 1570s he painted one the nation’s favourite pictures, the famous portrait The Tailor in the National Gallery.
The portrait is a late work, probably around 1570, and the most famous of Moroni's portraits; it was already celebrated in the 17th century, when it was in the Grimani collection in Venice.
The colourful costume of the tailor is contrasted with the black material marked with chalk lines that he prepares to cut. Most of the sitters in Moroni's later portraits are dressed in black in the Spanish fashion that persisted into the following century. The tailor's head, lit from above to the left, dominates the painting, the eyes, as in the majority of Moroni's portraits, looking directly at the spectator with shrewd appraisal.
The portrait is a late work, probably around 1570, and the most famous of Moroni's portraits; it was already celebrated in the 17th century, when it was in the Grimani collection in Venice.
The colourful costume of the tailor is contrasted with the black material marked with chalk lines that he prepares to cut. Most of the sitters in Moroni's later portraits are dressed in black in the Spanish fashion that persisted into the following century. The tailor's head, lit from above to the left, dominates the painting, the eyes, as in the majority of Moroni's portraits, looking directly at the spectator with shrewd appraisal.
Moroni in this painting is saying I am the real starof all this not that patron of the arts who is buying this painting hanging it in his house and displaying it as if it were his work, he can only buy something whereas I am the master . The second hero of the painting is the humble tailor through his eyes we see all the emotions of the man who creates in silence never recieving the applause that the owner of his fine suits will recieve. The silent revolution of Moroni was about to change the world of painting focusing on the painter through the eyes of the humble.
What we learn in this show of 40 or so pictures is that startlingly lifelike portrait wasn’t a one-off. Moroni was a so -so religious painter but when it came portraiture he was a genius, an artist whose understanding of the complexities of the human character I wouldn’t hesitate to compare to Shakespeare in literature – and in art, only to Degas.
Giovanni Battista Moroni (c. 1520/24[1] – February 5, 1579) was a North Italian painter of the Late Renaissance period. He is also 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 sixteenth century Italy.
The son of an architect, Andrea Moroni, he trained under Alessandro Bonvicino "Il Moretto" in Brescia, where he was the main studio assistant in the 1540s, and worked in Trent
, 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.
, 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 Trent 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 his sons. There were nineteenth-century claims that he was trained by Titian at Trento; however, it is improbable 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. Moroni spent his life in a part of Italy ruled by Spain. The intense naturalism of his painting style – with strong contrasts of light and dark, unflinching naturalism and diffused, silvery light owes something to the Spanish taste. But Bergamo is also not too far from Venice, and though his presence there is not documented, the way his brush caresses the textures of brocaded silk, pastel-coloured feathers and lynx fur reminds us that he was the contemporary of Titian and Veronese.
The politics of the region impinged directly on his life. Among his aristocratic clients in the city of Bergamo were the two leading families – the pro-Spanish Brembati, and the Albani, whose allegiance was to the Venetian Republic. A feud between the families caused by these political differences led to the murder in 1563 of Achille Brembati
by a son of the Albani family. As head of the family Giovanni Gerolamo Albani went into exile for five years. Perhaps tainted by his association with the Venetian faction, Moroni returned to his home town of Albino.
In this show a full length portrait of Countess Lucia Albani hangs opposite that of Isotta Brembati,
two richly dressed and sensationally bejewelled noblewomen seated in almost identical poses as though to suggest their rivalry, painted in the mid-1550s. Other members of their respective families are shown elsewhere in a gallery densely hung against dark walls to suggest the interior of a marble palace and the men in particularly look more than capable of taking on the roles of Tybalt or Mercutio. For all the beauty of these pictures, the artist who painted them is still the courtier. You don’t feel that he probes the characters of his sitters, or shows us anything they did not wish us to see.
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 and 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.
but for whom Moroni painted portraits of his sons. There were nineteenth-century claims that he was trained by Titian at Trento; however, it is improbable 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. Moroni spent his life in a part of Italy ruled by Spain. The intense naturalism of his painting style – with strong contrasts of light and dark, unflinching naturalism and diffused, silvery light owes something to the Spanish taste. But Bergamo is also not too far from Venice, and though his presence there is not documented, the way his brush caresses the textures of brocaded silk, pastel-coloured feathers and lynx fur reminds us that he was the contemporary of Titian and Veronese.The politics of the region impinged directly on his life. Among his aristocratic clients in the city of Bergamo were the two leading families – the pro-Spanish Brembati, and the Albani, whose allegiance was to the Venetian Republic. A feud between the families caused by these political differences led to the murder in 1563 of Achille Brembati
by a son of the Albani family. As head of the family Giovanni Gerolamo Albani went into exile for five years. Perhaps tainted by his association with the Venetian faction, Moroni returned to his home town of Albino.In this show a full length portrait of Countess Lucia Albani hangs opposite that of Isotta Brembati,
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 and 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: "the exact truth of parts nowhere added up, in his altar pictures, even to the semblance of credibility," Freedberg has observed of their diagrammatic schemes borrowed from Moretto and Savoldo and others. 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 Academy 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.
S.J. 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.
That has changed by the last gallery when we come to the great portrait of Giovanni Gerolamo Albani painted around 1568-70, when the ferocious old man had returned from exile. With his white beard and black cloak lined with fur, he sits in an armchair, tense, scowling, and with his eyes cast slightly aside as though unwilling to look at us. Striking too is the bump in the middle of his forehead, a blemish that could easily have been concealed but that the artist chose to include, The heart of the show are the portraits Moroni painted in the 1550s and 1560s, when living again in Albino. These are the works I think of as Shakespearean in the way they look beneath the prepared and defended faces most sitters present to an artist, to find the strength of character in the determined Lucia Vertova Agosti, a slight smirk in the portrait of the Lateran Canon, or the simple affection of the friendly young magistrate who was clearly a personal friend of the painter. Here Moroni no longer shrinks from depicting the blemishes, wrinkles and even the sun-damaged skin of his sitters.
Why did it happen? One suggestion is that because he lived in a provincial society, there was a limit to the number of his aristocratic clients. He therefore turned to wealthy middle class sitters, (a Canon, a Tailor, a Magistrate) who were happy to let him show the world who they were and what they had achieved. When he returned to paint the portrait of an aristocrat in his wonderful head of a young lady of around 1575 her quizzical, appraising look is like nothing in art at this date – she is a living breathing person, a character we feel we know in the same way as we ‘know’ Juliet or her nurse.
That has changed by the last gallery when we come to the great portrait of Giovanni Gerolamo Albani painted around 1568-70, when the ferocious old man had returned from exile. With his white beard and black cloak lined with fur, he sits in an armchair, tense, scowling, and with his eyes cast slightly aside as though unwilling to look at us. Striking too is the bump in the middle of his forehead, a blemish that could easily have been concealed but that the artist chose to include, The heart of the show are the portraits Moroni painted in the 1550s and 1560s, when living again in Albino. These are the works I think of as Shakespearean in the way they look beneath the prepared and defended faces most sitters present to an artist, to find the strength of character in the determined Lucia Vertova Agosti, a slight smirk in the portrait of the Lateran Canon, or the simple affection of the friendly young magistrate who was clearly a personal friend of the painter. Here Moroni no longer shrinks from depicting the blemishes, wrinkles and even the sun-damaged skin of his sitters.
Why did it happen? One suggestion is that because he lived in a provincial society, there was a limit to the number of his aristocratic clients. He therefore turned to wealthy middle class sitters, (a Canon, a Tailor, a Magistrate) who were happy to let him show the world who they were and what they had achieved. When he returned to paint the portrait of an aristocrat in his wonderful head of a young lady of around 1575 her quizzical, appraising look is like nothing in art at this date – she is a living breathing person, a character we feel we know in the same way as we ‘know’ Juliet or her nurse.
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, the seated half-figure of the Jesuit Ercole Tasso, traditionally called "Titian's Schoolmaster", although there is no real connection with Titian.
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 National Gallery, London,Pinacoteca Ambrosiana (Milan), Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan), Rijksmuseum, Studio Esseci (Padua, Italy), University of Arizona Museum of Art,
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