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The
Power of Art...
Politicians step aside for
CARAVAGGIO and the Giustiniani
| Was it the name 'Caravaggio'
or plain curiosity to see inside the seat of the Senate's presidency that
meant all of Rome showed up at Palazzo Giustiniani last Thursday evening?
At one stage, the queue of invitation only guests reached all the way around
the corner to the Pantheon. There are Caravaggio paintings all over Rome
one can see any time of the year and only five paintings by the master
in this show, so what was the rush? Women in fur coats and jewels tried
to charm their way in through the exit but the Senate guards were having
none of that ; no matter how many times they heard "Do you know who
I am?!" At one stage, young representatives of publishing giant Mondadori
(who sponsor the exhibition) announced to the crowd that instead of closing
at 8pm the doors would stay open till midnight, so that nobody would be
turned away.
Once inside, the crowd made a dive for the bar and the spumante flowed all night as the (by now) hungry Romans devoured handfuls of salted almonds. Great effort was made to regulate the flow of people in the suite of small offices on the upper floor which had been vacated by Senate President Nicola Mancino and converted into a gallery just for this exhibition. Not only did the organizers wish to protect the paintings but they were trying to avoid that dreadful situation where one sees only the back of other people's heads. The walls had been covered in deep Caravaggio blood red fabric and the lighting was very dramatic. Larger paintings hung in the splendid Sala Zuccari although the dazzling frescoes competed somewhat for attention. So all this preparation, all this Roman enthusiasm begs the question...was the exhibition worth it?
Facade of the Palazzo Giustiniani, venue for the Exhibition I overheard this conversation by two old master picture connoisseurs, one was coming out as the other was still in the queue. "Well my friend, what did you think of the exhibition?" and the reply; "Well, there are undoubtedly some stupendous paintings, very beautiful, but there are more pedestrian works than there are beautiful ones. I have seen more impressive exhibitions."This, I can well imagine, would be a typical reaction of many, provoked by the few superb Caravaggio works naturally overshadowing anything else in view. That is why he is a household name - his genius as an artist outshines his contemporaries. However the Roman connoisseur was forgetting the most important thing, this is not a Caravaggio exhibition. It is an admirable attempt to re-group the seventeenth century collection of two brothers Cardinal Benedetto and Vincenzo Giustiniani and to exhibit the paintings in their original location. It is the reconstruction of an idiosyncratic private collection not the modern day choice of some seicento scholar seeking to illustrate a historical theme or to blow our minds by cramming as many masterpieces as can be loaned into one show. It is far from the latter 'blockbuster' category samples of which, our Roman connoisseur was probably referring to. As such, we have a lot more to learn from this exhibition. An opportunity to analyse firsthand the psychology behind taste in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Instead of interpreting; we are witnessing - even if only a tiny fraction, just 69 out of a one time 600 paintings of the original Giustiniani collection is on view. The brothers owned no less than fifteen Caravaggios and are considered the artist's most important Roman patrons. Numerous great Italian collections
were dispersed circa 1800 and in the decades following. The British,
the Germans, anyone with money sent their agents to Italy and snapped up
entire collections at bargain prices from the impoverished nobility. The
Giustiniani did not escape this demise and by the end of the nineteenth
century they had sold off the collection.
The exhibition remains open
till the 15th of May and I particularly urge any student of seicento
art or the History of Collecting to go and see it. For everyone else, I
still say "go" if only for Caravaggio. What better pre-dinner date could
you have in the center of Rome? Queues should not be an issue now it is
open to the public - that was a special pleasure reserved for the
privileged.
Rachel Le Goff
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