His canvases are real pictorial marvels created in tragic times, of famine and pestilence, in early seventeenth-century Italy. At the service, but not too much, of the Counter-Reformation.
The exhibition scheduled for October at Palazzo dei Diamanti will be an unmissable opportunity to approach a fascinating though little-known chapter in the history of art. In fact, the exhibition appointment will be reserved for one of the great protagonists of seventeenth-century painting: the Ferrarese Charles Bononi, whose name, not surprisingly, has often been compared to those of Tintoretto, the Carracci or Caravaggio.
The review – the first monograph dedicated to him – is organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and is curated by Giovanni Sassu, curator of the Ancient Art Museums of the Este city, and by Francesca Cappelletti, professor of Modern Art History at the University of Studies of Ferrara.
For centuries Bononi, like the rest of the seventeenth century in Ferrara, remained in the shadows, overshadowed by the memory of the magical Renaissance season of the Este family. A slow critical recovery operation has progressively brought into focus the figure of a unique artist, who knew how to interpret the religious tension of his time in a sublime and intimate way.
Painter of large sacred decorative cycles and altarpieces, Bononi elaborates a pictorial language that focuses on emotion, the intimate and sentimental relationship between the painted figures and the observer. In the dramatic years of religious contrasts, earthquakes and plagues, the wise use of light and the masterful use of theatricality make him one of the first Baroque painters of the peninsula, as evidenced by the seductive decorations of Santa Maria in Vado.
But Bononi was also a great naturalist: in his works the sacred dialogues with the everyday. Canvases such as the Miracle of Soriano or the Guardian Angel show how much the artist felt the need to bring the religious story into reality, embodying saints and madonnas in real and concretely recognizable people. In this perspective, few like him have been able to combine the male nude with the representative needs of the still counter-reformist Italy of the early seventeenth century: his martyrs and saints are painted with powerful and, at the same time, persuasive perfection, but without any voyeuristic taste.
But Bononi not only painted religious subjects, he was also the surprising interpreter of a class of cultured patrons attentive to the arts, with distinctly musical preferences, inclined to somewhat licentious figurative contents, as evidenced by the various editions of the Genius of the arts, masterpieces with which Bononi openly dialogues with Caravaggio and his followers.
All this was clear to the eyes of contemporaries. The "divine" Guido Reni, a few months after the death of Carlo, which took place in 1632, exalted him describing him as a "non-ordinary painter" with "great and primary work", endowed with "a great wisdom in drawing and in the strength of the coloring ». A century later, Bononi attracted the attention of travelers on the Grand Tour, from Charles Nicolas Cochin to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, but also that of the great Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the abbot Luigi Lanzi, who, in the pictorial history of Italy defines him «one of the first that Italy saw after the Caracci». The idea that the greats of art history have made of this painter is strengthened by the evaluation of Jakob Burckhardt who in Cicerone (1855) in front of the decorations of Santa Maria in Vado declared himself convinced that he was facing the product of one of the brightest of its time.
