On 16 October 2024, the exhibition “DISEGNO. Italian Prints and Drawings in the Age of Renaissance and Mannerism” opens in the Gallery of Graphic Art in the Winter Palace. The display is dedicated to the memory of Arkady Ippolitov (1958–2023), a researcher in the State Hermitage’s Department of Western European Fine Art who was the keeper of Italian prints. Quotations from his writings about the exhibits appear alongside them. The art of drawing was the visceral thread for the entire Italian artistic process in the 15th and 16th centuries. The drawing was the laboratory in which the transition to the art of the Modern Era came about; it was what served as the starting point for painting, sculpture and architecture. The creative searches, unexpected insights and main discoveries came about first on a sheet of paper.
The print for its part was the guide to new creative ideas, the art of the model pattern. At first an example of new subjects or a visual textbook of anatomy, then a yardstick for style, and finally a sample of a personal manner of working, that is to say of artistic individuality.
Gathered together in one setting, the prints and drawings allow us to trace the complex, at times contradictory, yet meaty and vigorous picture of the evolution of Italian art at the time of its greatest flourishing.
The exhibition features some 150 works. They include miniatures executed on expensive parchment in the late 14th century and rapid sketches made from life by Mannerist artists, monumental colour woodcuts in the chiaroscuro technique and austere burin engravings, allegories that have still to be figured out and religious images full of pious emotion. On show are the personal creations of Andrea Mantegna, Filippino Lippi. Giulio Romano, Marcantonio Raimondi, Francesco Parmigianino, Baccio Bandinelli, Giovanni Bellini, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto. Many works have been given fresh attributions; several dozen are going on public display for the first time.
The exhibition curators are Vasily Mikhailovich Uspensky and Liubava Dmitriyevna Chistova, both researchers in the Department of Western European Fine Art.
The exhibition can be viewed by all holders of entrance tickets to the Main Museum Complex.
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More about the exhibition The Italian word disegno can be translated as “drawing” or “design”. For the theorists of the Renaissance era, however, it meant more – the general idea expressed in a drawing, the essence of a work of art, whether it was a painting, sculpture or architecture. Engravings at that time were quite often referred to as disegni stampati – “printed drawings”. On the one hand, that spoke to the aspect of reproduction, on the other hand, it testified to a recognition of the engraving’s ability to be the bearer of the fundamental artistic meaning – on a par with drawings or even at a higher level, since only the best compositions, selected from the collective mass, would become prints.
The drawing and the print developed along paths that were complicated and far from always straight. The history of the drawing is the history of personal artistic manners. It is almost impossible to regard or describe its evolution as a process conforming to a single line of logic. Still, the exhibition in the Gallery of Graphic Art allows us to track the drawing’s transformation from preparatory material for a painting, fresco or sculpture into an independent art form. Similarly, the print too turned in the 15th and 16th centuries from a technical means of replicating drawings in substantial numbers into a distinctive way of giving embodiment to an artistic image.
The exhibition of Italian prints and drawings is divided along chronological and geographical lines into five section. It is devoted to the way that the artistic ideas of Renaissance and Mannerist artists were realized in visual images on a sheet of paper, and to how that process was influenced by style, technique, the characteristics of local schools and the artist’s own personality.,
Assembled in the first hall are works by 15th-century draughtsmen and printmakers. They include drawings by Luca Signorelli, Francesco Francia and Filippino Lippi, as well as prints by Andrea Mantegna. One drawing that particularly stands out comes from the circle of Leonardo da Vinci and is connected with the master’s celebrated, but lost fresco of The Battle of Anghiari.
The second section is devoted to artists from the circle of Raphael and Michelangelo. On show here is a preparatory drawing for the murals in the Vatican loggias made by Raphael’s pupil and assistant Gianfrancesco (Giovanni Francesco) Penni, as well as prints created by Marcantonio Raimondi after original works by Raphael. These latter – The Massacre of the Innocents, Galatea and The Parnassus – are models of the elevated, strict Roman classicism of the High Renaissance. On display in the same hall is a sheet bearing studies of a male figure – a drawing by some unknown artist from Michelangelo’s circle, whose creator was seeking to emulate the great master’s manner full of inner energy and power. Alongside are works by Baccio Bandinelli and Daniele da Volterra, two artists who belonged in Michelangelo’s orbit.
A far greater diversity of artistic manners marks the third section of the exhibition – “The 16th Century. Mannerism from Rome to Florence”. This multifaceted style that cultivated originality manifested itself in the extravagant compositions of the flamboyant Rosso Fiorentino; the cold stylishness of works by Bartolomeo Passarotti and the Zuccaro brothers, Giorgio Ghisi’s elaborate allegories, such as The Dream of Raphael, and the drawings of Luca Cambiaso, whose fantastical way of geometrically abstracting shapes has made him a forerunner of Cubism in the eyes of a present-day viewer.
The fourth section – “The 16th Century. Emilia-Romagna. The Circle of Parmigianino” – continues the account of the fanciful expressiveness of Mannerism. Here viewers can see the light, free, inspired works of Francesco Parmigianino, a master who turned the drawing into self-sufficient art and transformed the print. The majority of his pieces are even devoid of a clear subject – for this artist that was a secondary concern. The main thing in these compositions is the grace of the figures, the exquisite complexity of the poses, the intriguing elusiveness of the situation. On show in the same hall are prints created by members of Parmigianino’s circle after his originals, including the famous Diogenes by Ugo da Carpi, one of the 16th century’s most perfect prints.
The fifth section presents the graphic art of Venice, a city that always stood apart, even among the diversity of the Italian schools. The story begins with Giovanni Bellini’s heartfelt Christ, continues with heroic images in prints based on originals by Titian, and ends with works by Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto. They include the last’s expressive preparatory drawing for his painting of The Martyrdom Of Saint Lawrence.
Drawings are the Italian artists’ “inner workings”, the first point of endeavour. Prints are the main means of making a finished artistic image known to the wider public. Between these two extremes – the initial impulse and its transformation into a picture ripe for distribution – lies the entire artistic process of the Renaissance and Mannerism.