Exhibition from November 28, 2015 – April 10, 2016 Venice, Museo Correr

Right from the outset, the art of Andrea Meldolla, better known as Schiavone (Zara, circa 1510-15 – Venice, 1563) divided Venetian public opinion for his evident nonconformity. A fine draughtsman and prolific etcher, he was appreciated by Giorgio Vasari, who in 1540 commissioned a Battle between Charles V and Barbarossa from him, subsequently given to Ottaviano de’ Medici.

In his Lives, Vasari declared that in Schiavone, he saw the embodiment of a “certain manner that is used in Venice, that is dashed off, or rather, sketched, without being in any respect finished”. Now the city celebrates the artist in the first retrospective to be ever dedicated to him, examining Schiavone’s production thanks to many international loans and the latest critical studies, together with his relationship with the more well-known Venetian artists of the time.

Schiavone’s work, admired by Marco Boschini and which stimulated the enthusiasm of El Greco, was solitary, non-academic and in some ways rebellious; an evident feature is his role as precursor in the definition of a new synthetic style, with a sometimes almost “informal” touch, that was able to influence even Titian and Tintoretto.

The exhibition will, for the very first time allow scholars and the interested public to see brought together a substantial number of works by Schiavone in all three of the media in which he significantly worked – namely, etching, painting, and drawing – and in all phases of his career from youthful (ca. 1540) to very late (c. 1562).

In addition to the many and various works on display by Schiavone himself, the exhibition includes a selection of well-chosen of paintings and engravings by other Cinquecento artists known to Schiavone with a view to clarifying the nature of their relationships with him. These include Parmigianino – so important in Schiavone’s youthful development and never left wholly behind – and the codifiers of the Florentine Maniera, Vasari and Francesco Salviati, both present and active in Venice in 1539-42. The exhibition shows us many of Schiavone’s creative variations and transformations of prototypes originating with these artists and with Raphael. Among his Venetian contemporaries – Tintoretto, Titian, Sustris, Bassano, and others – are represented here by particularly relevant examples of their work, allowing the visitor to assay the nature of Schiavone’s relationships to them and theirs to him.

In many different ways, then, this exhibition will inform and expand our appreciation of this highly talented painter, etcher, and draftsman whose individual sensibility allowed him to combine a wholehearted receptivity to Emilian and Maniera formal ideas with a radical interpretation of Venetian painterly values and techniques – this being visible in his etchings as well as his paintings – an interpretation so radical, so extreme as to scandalize some of the artists’ contemporaries (e.g., Paolo Pino 1548, “Quell’ empiastrar … degna d’infamia”).

It was this paradoxical combination that made Andrea Schiavone “a catalytic agent in the evolution of Venetian painting in the sixteenth century,” as well as an individual fascinating artist in his own right.

Making use of loans from some of Europe’s leading museums – from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and from the National Gallery and British Museum of London to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister of Dresden – this exhibition will finally make it possible to rediscover this brilliant artist as an independent master, but also to appreciate his diversified activities in the fields of drawings, prints, illustrated books and the applied arts.

-

Curated by Enrico Dal Pozzolo e Lionello Puppi Scientific direction: Gabriella Belli Layout design: Daniela Ferretti Co-produced with 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE