Exhibition
This year, as a starting point for reflection during the season of Lent and Easter, the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini presents the display of the Lamentation by Giovanni Bellini (Venice, c. 1435 – 1516), a masterpiece by the Venetian master, held in the Musei Vaticani, with which – in collaboration with Casa Testori – four contemporary artists, LETIA Letizia Cariello, Emma Ciceri, Francesco De Grandi and Andrea Mastrovito, have engaged, building a genuine dialogue with surprising results.
The precious panel originally formed the crowning element (cimasa) of the altarpiece created by Bellini between 1472 and 1474 for the high altar of the church of San Francesco in Pesaro – one of the supreme masterpieces of Italian painting, which marks the painter’s maturity and seals his role as the leading figure of Venetian painting.
The scene depicts the moment when the body of Christ, just before burial, is anointed with oils and perfumes. In a narrow, compressed space – rendered with a strongly foreshortened viewpoint from below, taking account of the height at which the panel was to be placed – the statuesque presence of the four figures stands out: Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, as well as the Magdalene, who holds Jesus’s hand in her own. It is precisely the extraordinary interweaving of hands that forms the focal point of the representation: it is there that the viewer’s gaze converges, thanks to Bellini’s masterly orchestration, which – with clear, limpid light and a sharp alternation of light and dark – guides the eye from Christ’s legs abandoned on the sepulchre to the wound in his side, and it is there too that all the gazes of the figures depicted converge. From that gentle yet dramatic tangle of hands, the four monumental figures extend along oblique lines, brought out by the raking light against the background of a spring-blue sky, creating a scene charged with emotion, with an almost visionary power that makes it a suspended meditation on human suffering on the one hand and divine nature on the other.
The exhibition is completed by a section presenting the works of four contemporary artists who have engaged with Bellini’s masterpiece, reflecting on the themes suggested by the work, to bear witness to how deeply the Venetian master’s panel is able to touch the hearts of artists of our own time: the Lamentation is indeed a masterpiece that transcends its historical dimension and stirs the sensibility of contemporary men and women in the face of death, suffering, compassion and, in particular, the value of care.
