Italy’s Lombardy, a Hot Spot for Eccentric Artists

A head made of fruits and vegetables, a beardless Jesus, and a saint full of arrows

‘Q uando, Quando, Quando” was a hit single in 1962 or 1963. It means “when, when, when” in Italian — when will we share a love divine, in a year, a day, or an hour? Connie Francis sang it in Italian and English, and it’s delicious. I thought of it the other day, when Vermont’s governor extended our lockdown for another month. It’s not love divine I’m after. It’s “when’s this freakin’ disaster gonna end?”

Vermont’s had 30 coronavirus deaths in a population of 660,000, in a place where there’s rarely more than one person per acre. Reserved and laconic, Vermonters invented social distancing. That’s why there are so few of us. The average age of the dead is 80, and most lived in nursing homes.

And 70,000 Vermonters are now out of work, 22 percent of the state’s workforce. That’s small fry compared with the 22 million Americans (the Fed has predicted it may reach 47 million), mostly low- to middle-income workers, now jobless because government, the press, and smug, data-fudging, TV-loving scientists crashed the best economy since, well, the days of “Quando, Quando, Quando.”

Aren’t there better ways to spend $2.2 trillion? Last time we torched so much money was the war in Iraq.

The song made me think about Italy. My mother was Italian, and I have a big family in the province of Pesaro e Urbino, due east of Florence on the Adriatic. I’m my father’s WASPy son in every respect except for one. I instinctively know that we humans always exist on the edge of a cliff. That’s Italian.

I wondered why Italy is the hottest of viral hot spots, aside from Queens, Spain, and China, where the disease started and which lies about everything COVID-19. I asked my family.

Most deaths are in Lombardy, the region in northern Italy that includes Milan. They’re concentrated in Bergamo and Brescia. I’ll get to my real topic — the art of Lombardy — in a minute, by the way. Both are affluent, intensely commercial cities. Both are textile capitals with deep business ties to China. Wuhan is one of the textile capitals of China. Thanks, Berlusconi. Grasping for ways to juice its slack economy, he hitched Italy’s business wagon to China’s hammer and sickle.

I also wondered why no one talks about the art of Lombardy. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) lived in Milan for 23 years, and The Last Supper, from 1498, is there. Caravaggio (1571–1610) was born in Milan. His family moved to a town near Bergamo to escape the 1576 plague, which killed 100,000 people in northern Italy.

It’s hard to call Lombardy a backwater. It’s got Milan and a dozen prosperous smaller cities, among them Brescia and Bergamo but also Pavia, Cremona, Mantua, and Lodi. The chief business of Lombardy, though, is business, not culture, to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, the antithesis to all things Italian. After 1556, it was ruled by Spain. Artists with big ambitions followed kings and popes, not viziers.

Leonardo privileged empirical observation of nature. This became the basis for the Lombard still-life tradition. “Sfumato,” a hazy atmosphere and a soft focus for faces, comes from Leonardo. I would call Leonardo a hypernaturalist, too. His fascination with the natural world is clear from his drawings, but in his paintings his figures are limber, gestural, and convincingly engaged. Those are his legacies in Milan.

Did he leave a school of artists there? One of his students, Bernardino Luini, is believed by many scholars to have painted the $450 million Leonardo sold at Christie’s.

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio was a wonderful portraitist. Romanino — he had one name, like Madonna and Fabio — painted a few versions of The Last Supper, one in a horseshoe form with a lovely, microscopically detailed table setting. Il Sodoma was a brilliant painter whom Vasari tagged as a sexual transgressor, hence the name. Gaudenzio Ferrari (1471–1546) is the most flamboyant of Leonardo’s acolytes. His figure types are Leonardesque, and he’s a stickler for detail and focus. His St. Catherine Miraculously Saved from the Torture of the Wheel, from about 1520, is an example of aesthetic density that’s sometimes manic.

Lombard painting often has this packed quality. This picture is especially wild. It’s a glass hive, with the saint as the anchor. Execution by wheel was a long, ghastly thing. Catherine is placed between two spiked wheels, with an executioner at each side poised to grind her, and they’re in no hurry. She was the convert daughter of the Roman governor of Alexandria, so she was a Christian prize. She’s a beauty straight from Leonardo casting.

Condemned by the emperor, she merely touched the wheel and it miraculously shattered. Baffled and furious, he ordered her beheaded, which did the trick, though she bled milk, not blood. Each stage of the drama is depicted in one painting. Catherine was canonized and widely venerated until the 1960s, when her story was deemed fictional. Gaudenzio is a showman, and he delivers a Cecil B. de Mille–type drama set at night, immensely acrobatic and gestural, with portrait-like faces.

I would call the Lombard aesthetic eccentric. Artists weren’t sheltered from trends in Rome, Venice, or Florence, but they weren’t clobbered by them. Some good free thinking happened. Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was from Milan, but he’s best known for his work in Prague and Vienna for three Holy Roman Emperors, specifically his allegorical portraits. They’re unique.

Four Seasons in One Head, from 1590, uses the flowers, fruits, and vegetables of the seasons as building blocks for an imaginary portrait. It’s the zenith of anthropomorphism. Arcimboldo painted it at the end of his peripatetic life, when he was back in Milan, returning to his roots, and knotty roots, asleep in winter, make the head’s face, and a gnarled old face at that. Grapes and apples represent autumn, wheat and cherries summer, and flowers spring.

Arcimboldo’s portraits of kings look like vegetable platters. They were meant to amuse, and they’re filled with puns, but they’re serious, too. His royal patrons, he was happy to emphasize, ruled over all creation, humanity, land and water, and don’t forget the crudités.

The Librarian, from 1566, is composed of books, layers or books with layers of meaning. It’s possibly a portrait of Maximilian II’s in-house curator, or it could be a fantasy portrait. I look at it less as a portrait and more as a geometric study. It might be a parody of rich people who collect books but never read them.

Arcimboldo’s work dissolved into obscurity. Still life is rungs lower than history or mythological painting, and Arcimboldo’s still lifes are weird, in any age. The surrealists rediscovered him in the 1920s, though The Librarian is more like cubism’s Model T.

Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) was another eccentric, born in Venice but working in Bergamo from 1513 to 1525. He’s another offbeat, brilliant painter. He’s Venetian, so he was a master of luscious color, but in Venice his career never got traction. He wandered, so he’s not associated with one school. He worked mostly in Bergamo, Treviso, and in the Marche.

His monumental Martinengo altarpiece in Bergamo, from 1516, is his biggest painting. It’s a “sacra conversazione,” like a saintly cocktail party, and that explains the casual poses, but everyone is too chatty, packed, and mannered. That’s the criticism art historians dumped on Lotto.

He was rediscovered a few years ago and is best known as a portraitist. His portrait subjects quiz us, even taunt us. Andrea Odoni, a Venetian businessman and collector, hung Lotto’s 1527 portrait of himself in his bedroom. He’s a hunk, possibly self-absorbed, surrounded by marble hunks but fiddling a crucifix necklace in one hand and a small sculpture of the Beautiful Diana — a Roman fertility goddess type distinguished by multiple, cherry-sized breasts, or are they bull testicles, as I once read? He’s thinking, “allora, quale vuoi — cativo o bello?” Which will it be, naughty or nice?

Lotto painted the portrait after years in Bergamo. Odoni, big as Pavarotti, stars but the picture’s a beautifully staged, dense still life, too. Lotto’s focus on interiors — and landscapes, too — became a feature of many of his portraits.

Caravaggio is the 800-pound gorilla in Lombard painting. Older artists inspired his “dark manner,” pools of dark abruptly juxtaposed against lights, use of everyday types as models, and deep focus on objects, faces, and hands. Conservatives found his work indecorous, both ugly and undignified. Lombardy’s still-life tradition and its taste for hypernaturalism, photo-realism’s ancestor, provided Caravaggio with an aesthetic foundation.

His “chiaroscuro,” strong contrasts of dark and light, repackages the nocturnes of Correggio, from Parma, and Bassano, from Bassano del Grappa, both on the Lombard border. Caravaggio intensifies the effect of the nocturne, which was then newish and rare in painting, and he makes it more theatrical.

Supper at Emmaus, from 1601, is Caravaggio’s Lombard amalgam. It’s the start of his mature style. It’s a still life, or a still-life composite, with the table setting, clothing, and common faces. Even the light is a still life, conveyed with exactness and with relief-giving contrasts. Jesus is beardless, not exactly new in religious art but still scandalous. His face has contours like the fruit, bread, and cooked chicken. It’s a gesture picture, too, far simpler than Leonardo’s, Romanino’s, or Lotto’s but the outstretched and angled arms seem to concentrate the same energy.

The Lombard Caravaggisti concoct magic from skeins of reality. Evaristo Baschenis (1617–1677) worked in Bergamo, mostly in still life. He’s an unheralded great. Still life seems to have a special place among Lombard painters. Caravaggio, after all, began his career painting still lifes in Milan. Baschenis’s are mostly musical instruments — Cremona, home of Strativeri and the best violins, is in Lombardy. They’re very beautiful and mysterious, even haunting. His style is ultra-finished and so focused on detail that the instruments feel alive.

His sense of perspective is, and here’s a pun, pitch-perfect. His lutes and violins, curved and irregular, meticulously lay in space. Baschenis was a priest. He does reverence well. He doesn’t do whimsy and riddles like Arcimboldo, but both are driven by shapes. I think that’s why they were the lost souls in art history until Modernism.

A bit outside Lombardy, in Varallo in Piedmont, lived the wonderful, also idiosyncratic Tanzio da Varallo (1575–1632). He’s an acquired taste. Like Caravaggio, he uses deep darks and glaring lights in juxtaposition. This makes for drama and angst. He finds his models on the street, painting them in a hyperrealistic style. Caravaggio did both, but if Caravaggio’s effect is solemn, Tanzio’s is overwrought, even lurid.

In St. Sebastian Tended by the Widow Irene and an Angel, the saint’s acrobatic position is porn-star worthy. That’s part of its film noir feel. It doesn’t have the genre’s nihilism and doesn’t feel seamy. What Tanzio gives us is expressionist lighting, deep focus, a disorienting composition, acid, iridescent color, and bones and muscles pushed toward, but not to, an extreme.

It’s not a bad strategy given the scene. Pulling arrows from a live body makes for tension and anxiety. Sebastian’s in rapture — or is he moaning, “buon per me, mi ha fatto in male boia,” or, “lucky for me, I got the executioner who couldn’t shoot straight”?

There’s the Italian art lesson for today. Apologies to Giulio Romano, from Mantua, Giovanni Battista Moroni, from Brescia, and the Campis from Cremona. I can’t cover everyone. I’m on Chinese-virus duty a lot these days and will write soon about the $200 million that Congress allotted to the arts in the CARES Act. I’m also planning stories on the art of plagues, silver at the Victoria & Albert, and the Hispanic Society’s treasures show in Houston.

One day, soon, I hope, museums will reopen. Maybe they’ll discover they really don’t need as much staff and might try focusing on their core mission.