Piccio. Tutta la pittura e un’antologia grafica

By Art History

Renzo Mangili

Piccio. Tutta la pittura e un’antologia grafica

Lubrina editore, Bergamo, 2014

Renzo Mangili’s impeccable, excellently documented monograph on Giovanni Carnovali called Piccio reconstructs the production of this elusive, ingenious Lombard artist, who is removed from the mists of a conventional romantic image of mannered “rebellion” and returned to the historically more complex developments in Italian painting in the 19thcentury, characterised by academic-type historicism, the last embers of an extreme Neoclassicism, trends towards politically engaged realism and the beginnings of the avant-garde of the Scapigliati. The result is a compelling updated account of one of the most fascinating personalities of 19th-century Italian painting. The twofold register of the wellbalanced narrative consists of a presentation of production and contexts, on one hand, and the detailed description of his paintings, on the other, with significant examples also of his graphic work. To get an idea of the highly effective method of enquiry in the monograph and the manifold points of view, which chart the close-knit logic of the relationship between life and work, involving a re-examination of the overall chronology, you only have to glance down the paragraph titles in the introductory essay referring to ancient and contemporary sources and the models for Carnovali’s works (from Correggio to Parmigianino, Lotto and Moroni, crucial for his portraits); he renewed and reinterpreted these models with a free spirit. There is also a focus on patrons, the human and social context, the genres tackled by the painter – from portraiture, in which he excelled, to landscape and bozzetto for  collectors and his graphic works (the catalogue has an anthology), his critical fortune, and the collectors who contributed to his fame. Pursued in a rigorous historiographical framework, this study has depicted for posterity a major figure, whose poetics are based – as the author stresses – on “indefectible quality and strict consistency in their development” within “an individual straining towards the Modern”.