The Bergamasque and Brescian Renaissance is one of the main variations of Renaissance art in Italy. The importance of the two cities on the art scene only expanded from the 16th century onward, when foreign and local artists gave rise to an original synthesis of Lombard and Venetian modes, due in part to the two cities' particular geographical position: the last outpost of the Serenissima on the mainland for Bergamo and a disputed territory between Milan (and its rulers) and Venice for Brescia.
The masters from Bergamo and Brescia were at the origin of a "third way" of late Renaissance, after the Roman-Florentine and the Venetian ones, which was of fundamental importance since it was at the basis of the later developments of the revolutionary language of Caravaggio, who was a native of those very areas..
Origins Bergamo and Brescia saw in the 15th century a significance in the Italian art scene that can be described as "satellite" compared to centers such as Milan and Venice. It was due to Francesco Sforza that Filarete worked in Bergamo (in the cathedral, c. 1455), and even a masterpiece like Giovanni Antonio Amadeo's Colleoni Chapel (1470-1476) is unthinkable outside the context of Sforza commissions of the time, such as the Milan Cathedral and, above all, the Certosa di Pavia, from which he drew Renaissance cues.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Brescia represented an island compared to the Leonardism and Bramantism reigning in Milan, so much so that it was chosen as a refuge by Vincenzo Foppa, a Lombard artist of the "first generation" of the Renaissance.
The milestones of the local Renaissance were concentrated in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century: the meeting of Romanino and Titian in Padua in 1511, the arrival of Lorenzo Lotto in Bergamo in 1513, the relocation of Savoldo to Venice in about 1520, and the arrival in Brescia of Titian's Averoldi Polyptych in 1522.
Lotto in Bergamo
A quantum leap then occurred in Bergamo when Giovanni Cariani, a native of Bergamo but resident in Venice, (since 1517) and, above all, Lorenzo Lotto settled there. The latter arrived in 1513 to paint the large altarpiece, Martinengo for the church of Santo Stefano. The provincial environment allowed him to move freely according to the inclinations of his own style, without adapting to the magniloquent modes of the "modern style" of the Roman Renaissance. In Bergamo, supported by a cultured and wealthy patronage, he was able to gather the influences most suited to him, freeing himself from the language dominant in the more important centers of the peninsula. To his never-forgotten Venetian roots he could add cues from Gaudenzio Ferrari, the young Correggio, Nordic art and the local Lombard influence..
The Martinengo Altarpiece (1513-1516) already showed some bold innovations, such as the arrangement of the throne of Mary and the saints with a church nave behind them (and not an apse as was typical), the dome open to the sky (a reference to Mantegna), the intense characterization of the characters and the vibrant light, which generate an unstable effect in the scene.
The later San Bernardino Altarpiece (1521) shows a very bright palette, a modern treatment of shadows and a dizzying foreshortening of the angels, as well as a sense of perception of the viewer's presence by Mary and, especially the angel at the foot of the throne, who interrupts the scene by turning around in surprise.
In addition to the fresco cycles rich in iconographic novelties, such as that of the Suardi Chapel in Trescore Balneario, and besides the intense and close portraits, it was above all the ambitious project of the inlays of the choir of Santa Maria Maggiore that kept him busy until his departure in 1526. A dispute over payment with the friars then kept him always away from the city, to which he never returned despite having spent the most fruitful time of his career there.
The Renaissance in Brescia
The beginnings The very first, vague hints of a new decorative and compositional style that surpassed the International Gothic were to be found, in the field of painting, in some "top-down" works in medieval fifteenth-century Brescia, primarily Antonio Vivarini's polyptych of Saint Ursula for the church of San Pietro in Oliveto.. The work had notable influences on local art,. found, for example, in the evolution of Paolo da Caylina the Elder's art toward fuller forms, as in the Madonna and Child between Saints Lawrence and Augustine, which, painted after the arrival of Vivarini's polyptych, displays precisely these features..
Another "top-down" proto-Renaissance work in 15th-century Brescia was Jacopo Bellini's Annunciation painted for the church of Sant'Alessandro, faithful to the language of International Gothic but with relative novelties in the spatial conception and stance of the figures.
Other movements in this direction can be seen in sporadic works produced by the local culture in the second half of the century, such as the large panel of Saint George and the Princess attributed to Antonio Cicognara or a master related to him, where the aristocratic Gothic stylistic features imported to Brescia by Gentile da Fabriano in the lost chapel of San Giorgio al Broletto evolve toward new spatial and luministic proportions..
Vincenzo Foppa
The first Renaissance author on the Brescian scene, the founder of the Brescian school, but also of the entire Lombard context, was Vincenzo Foppa, who worked in the city only after he moved there permanently, in 1489, until his death in about 1515..
The works he produced in this short period, not all of which have come down to us, demonstrate a general reworking of his artistic language in the light of the increasingly pressing Renaissance innovations, derived primarily from Leonardo da Vinci's teachings, while remaining faithful to his characteristic "archaizing" style. Thus one finds the Pala della Mercanzia, conceived in an iron will for linear and luminous absoluteness: the resulting trepid and yet rarefied reality would constitute a crucial lesson for Moretto. From the same period is the polyptych from which comes the Nativity of Jesus at Chiesanuova, painted precisely in this spirit of reworking. In the Stendardo di Orzinuovi, a last work painted by the almost 90-year-old Foppa, humanity and nature are defined in a stern and monumental language, while the various figures are charged with an expressive intensity imbued with physicality: this true "pictorial testament" would also constitute a solid starting point for Moretto and a clear reference for Savoldo, who was already working at the time.
Upon his return to Brescia, Foppa obtained, as an ultimate recognition from the city's General Council, the entrustment of a regular art course to instruct local youths, for an annual stipend of 100 lire.
The "intermediate generation" Vincenzo Foppa and Moretto constitute the two cornerstones of Brescian Renaissance painting, and it was the latter who would eventually become the major exponent of the local school. However, in order to fully understand the development of Brescian Renaissance art, it is not possible to overlook what is usually referred to as the "intermediate generation," that is, a number of painters who worked between the end of the fifteenth century and the first thirty years of the sixteenth century (exactly between Foppa and the maturity of Moretto), producing a series of works of high artistic merit developed within a local culture influenced mainly by Foppa, an environment that would prove no stranger to the formation and subsequent establishment of the great masters..
Floriano Ferramola Floriano Ferramola (ca. 1480-1528) was schooled in the late fifteenth-century Brescia nurtured by the art of Foppa and his elaborations, including those of Vincenzo Civerchio, generating a vast output especially in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. More influenced by local movements than by Foppa's cultured art, his style is related to Umbrian-Emilian painting that penetrated into eastern Lombardy through Perugino and Lorenzo Costa. Ferramola's works always kept to modest but novelistic, storytelling tones..
It was Ferramola's art that attracted the vast majority of civil and religious patrons in early 16th-century Brescia: his famous Stories of Saints found widespread success in a variety of monasteries in the city and territory, for example in Santa Giulia, San Giuseppe, Santa Croce, and Santa Maria del Carmine (in collaboration with Civerchio), and then again in Lovere, Bedizzole, Nave, Bovezzo and Quinzano d'Oglio, creating a veritable school and influencing almost all provincial painters: most of the early 16th-century frescoes that have come down to us in churches throughout the Brescian territory can be traced to his style. Many interventions occurred in the palaces of the nobility of the time, especially in a city context: the cycle in the hall of honor of Palazzo Calini, now dispersed among the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery and Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, represents one of the finest productions of secular painting in early sixteenth-century Lombardy.
The narrative serenity of which Ferramola became a master, as well as his chromatic tonalities, varied and delicate naturalistic, scenic and environmental notions had substantial repercussions on Moretto, who reached artistic maturity precisely during Ferramola's period of greatest productive activity (1520–30).
Vincenzo Civerchio A native of Crema, Vincenzo Civerchio (1468/70-1544) worked mainly in Brescia from the last years of the 15th century. In this period he produced a substantial number of works, some lost (such as the frescoes in the choir of the Old Cathedral) and others that have come down to us, such as the Deposition in the church of Sant'Alessandro and part of a decorative cycle in the chapel of the Virgin for the aforementioned church of Santa Maria del Carmine, done in collaboration with Ferramola.
At the forefront of the painter's production, however, is the polyptych of St. Nicholas of Tolentino for the church of St. Barnabas, signed and dated 1495, a work of the highest value in which Civerchio reveals a vast composite culture derived from the teachings of Bergognone and Bernardino Butinone, connected with an effective painting technique and an accurate expressive realism of the characters..
Paolo da Caylina the Younger Paolo da Caylina the Younger (c. 1485-1545) was also educated in the proto-Renaissance Brescia of Foppa and Civerchio, later growing up in the footsteps of Ferramola, with whom he often found himself collaborating, until he was called to the monastery of Santa Giulia to complete the frescoes in the nuns' choir.
Similar to the latter, Caylina also enjoyed great success among the patrons of the time, creating around him a school of like-minded painters. His production, however, quickly received strong influences from the great local masters, especially Moretto and Romanino, being practically contemporary with them. Already in works from the beginning of the century, for example in the Adoration of the Cross with Saints Constantine, Helena, and Sylvester for the church of Santa Croce, one can find the compositional patterns and expressive attitudes that these masters, especially Moretto, would repeat in their early productions and then evolve into more mature models..
Clear transitional features can also be found in the two panels with the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi in the polyptych of the Madonna of Mercy in the church of Sant'Agata (c. 1520), where typically fifteenth-century forms are combined with a wide and deep spatiality, a softness of bodies and a chromatic richness with warm and luminous tones borrowed from the early production of Romanino and Moretto and from the new Venetian influences brought to local art by these authors..