National Gallery scours UK collections for ‘unfashionable’ Caravaggio
When staging a blockbuster art exhibition, it is usual for curators to call on the leading museums of the world to loan their finest objects.
But the National Gallery has this year turned instead to the UK’s smallest art collections, scouring churches, stately homes and private houses for works of Caravaggio.
Nearly 50 works of art will be assembled at the gallery, showing how Caravaggio and his followers were once so deeply unfashionable that only a select few ventured to col- lect them. The star painting of the exhibition, The Supper at Emmaus, was so unpopular in days gone by that it was given to the gallery in 1839 by an owner who could not find anyone to buy it at Christie’s.
The show, curators hope, will reveal how Caravaggio’s fortunes were dramatically revived in the 20th century, leaving private collections and small institutions with works worth millions of pounds.
Letizia Treves, the show’s curator, said the exhibition would trace works from being “deeply unfashionable” in the 19th century to some of the gallery’s most popular today.
“There are an enormous number of great masterpieces in this country, in regional museums, National Trust Houses, private collections,” she said. “But people don’t necessarily go on a pilgrimage to see them. “I’m trying to redress that balance.” While the works of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and his followers were appreciated in his lifetime, Treves said, they fell out of fashion from the middle of the 17 th century.
Critics derided them for “deeply distasteful” religious imagery, calling them “vulgar, ugly and exces- sive” with such ferocity that many works had their names changed or sold for little money.
Picked up by gentlemen on the Grand Tour, many travelled to Britain where they entered collections.
The majority of the 49 paintings in the National Gallery exhibition will now come from local museums, stately homes, castles, churches and private collections, with many “unfamiliar” to the general public.
Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, said: “Four centuries on, Caravaggio’s art still retains the power to inspire, awe and surprise. NineLives If you go
Four centuries on, Caravaggio’s art still retains the power to inspire, awe and surprise.” Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery Beyond Caravaggio opens in London on October 12.
“The exhibition shows how his revolutionary paintings, which were praised and damned in equal measure by his contemporaries, had a profound impact on dozens of artists from all over Europe, giving rise to a truly international phenomenon.”