Professor Deborah Loft to explain the Venetian School of painting at the IIC

San Francisco is known as a very active cultural city and the “Masters of Venice” exhibition at the de Young Museum is a further confirmation. The actual title of the exhibition is: “Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power” and is a worldwide exclusive presentation of fifty works by Venetian painters like Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoretto, Mantegna, and more, all on loan from the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

On December 1, in order to present this amazing exhibition, art historian Deborah Loft, (Professor of Art History at College of Marin), explained what characterizes the Venetian artistic movement, at the Italian cultural Institute of San Francisco. L’Italo Americano was there and is glad to share with you some interesting information. “The Venetian School” is the name of a pictorial movement which began in the Republic of Venice in the fourteenth century and spread all over Europe.

Around the fourteenth century the Venetian painters began to be influenced by the Gothic movements from Northern Europe, in particular from Flanders and Southern Germany. The first and famous representative of “the Venetian School” was Paolo Veneziano. He gave the emergent Venetian School a style presenting a mixture of Byzantine and Gothic elements with a marked feeling of color.

Quickly “the Venetian School” became internationally appreciated and requested, particularly in the courts and in the imperial dominions. Many important painters shown in the exhibition were part of this artistic movement; Giorgione is one of them.

He was the first to paint landscapes with figures, the first to paint genre — movable pictures in their own frames with no devotional, allegorical, or historical purpose — and the first whose colors possessed that ardent and glowing intensity which was so soon to typify the work of all the Venetian School.

The most famous artist among all Venetian artists was Titian. Initially he was a business partner and assistant of Giorgione, who considerably influenced him. Certainly he had indubitable pictorial qualities, and his method of applying and using the color will influence future generations of Western Art.

During the sixteenth century, “the Venetian School” became so important that it started to influence the movements of Northern Europe which had originally given birth to it. Artists such as Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto became a model of inspiration in all Europe. In architecture there is a similar movement with Palladio, who is often described as the most influential and most copied architect in Europe and in America (the main example is the White House in Washington D.C.).

The “Masters of Venice” exhibition at the de Young Museum includes Titian’s sumptuous “Danáe” (1560s), Mantegna’s “Saint Sebastian” (1457–1459) and four rare paintings by Giorgione, including “The Three Philosophers” (ca. 1508–1509) and “Portrait of a Young Woman” (1506). The exhibition also includes works by Palma il Vecchio, Bordone, Bassano, and more. Together, these examples represent the range of accomplishment of the Venetian painting during the Renaissance age.

This exhibit is a rare and unique chance to see excellent masterpieces which show the aesthetic beauty of Italian and Venetian art. The exhibition is on view through February 12, 2012.

For more information visit http://deyoung.famsf.org/

Valentina Calabrese
contributor