A show bringing the work of pre-Renaissance master Gentile da Fabriano back to his home town for the first time in centuries was inaugurated Thursday by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Organisers have managed to put together the biggest-ever collection of works, 32, by an artist who is also sadly famous for the number of his works which have been lost. Another 100 pieces will frame those of the master from the east-central Marche region, highlighting Gentile's influence on other major artists of his time, working in a pre-Renaissance idiom called International Gothic.
Some of these are real heavyweights like Masaccio, the young artist who helped kickstart the Renaissance in Florence, at least as far as painting was concerned. Curator Lorenza Mochi Onori, the Marche art superintendent who put the show together with Gentile experts like Keith Christiansen of the United States, said the works would highlight how the artist, with his arts-and-all court portraiture and sublime devotional work, was "at once intensely realistic and intensely religious".
She further credited Gentile with being "the first really important landscape painter, an extraordinary student of light and natural phenomena". Seventy-three of the works in the show have come from Italy, 15 from the United States, eight from France, three each from Germany and Britain, two from Austria and one from the Czech Republic.
The exhibition traces the development of Gentile's art over the course of his life (1370-1427) and shows how he managed to obtain major commissions from all the leading courts in northern Italy. Originally named Gentile di Niccolo' di Giovanni di
Massio, Gentile da Fabriano was hailed as one of the greatest artists of his day but most of the work which created his contemporary reputation has disappeared.
Some of the most highly praised were two frescos: in the Doges' Palace in Venice (1408) and St John Lateran in Rome (1427).
Gentile also worked in Florence, Siena, and Orvieto.
His most famous surviving work is an altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi, Florence, 1423), painted for the church of Santa Trinita' in Florence. Many art critics say this alone allows him to vie with the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti as Italy's greatest
International Gothic artist. It has been celebrated for its decorative majesty and naturalistic light effects.
Gentile influenced his assistant in Venice Pisanello, his collaborator in Florence Jacopo Bellini, and Fra Angelico, widely regarded as his heir. Before the show at a former church hospice in Fabriano, no painting by the city's most famous son had ever hung there.
"Gentile is Fabriano's most illustrious citizen and yet none of his works have remained in Fabriano," noted local household-appliance mogul Francesco Merloni, the main sponsor of the show. In tandem with the Fabriano show, four other exhibitions in other Marche towns will shed light on sculpture and other artistic developments during Gentile's time.
Gentile da Fabriano And The Other Renaissance runs from April 21 to July 23.
