Non it never tells that Antonio da Leonelli from Crevalcore (Crevalcore, around 1438-1441-Bologna, between 1515 and 1525) is a minor, or that warns a local or regional dimension, because he, in truth, is an extraordinary artist and amazing inventor, and he is not afraid of confrontations.
If you can, of him, consider a condition of not absolute greatness, is perhaps on the execution of some paintings, not at the level of Piero della Francesca, but his inventions are absolute, and such that they can make him consider a genius. Not surprisingly, his name has been approached, he lived, or recently disappeared, to those of Leonardo, Michelangelo, of the great artists of his time.
Antonio da Crevalcore He was the first Italian painter to have faced the dead nature as a genreand that the religious theme has been allowed to break through. As Giorgione had done with The storm, By moving the field, the genre, from the Madonna and the saints to nature and the landscapeto the relationship of the figures with nature, so Crevalcore did with the composition of the dead nature, a hundred years before the Caravaggio of the famous Fruit basket of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.
In reality, there is more. Everything, in Antonio Leonelli da Crevalcore, is a dead nature: people, the saints, and not just objects and landscapes. And, in this sense, he He climbs the limits of his time, imposing himself for absolute modernity, so much so as to dialogue with De Chirico and Magritte. By paradox, in a sort of mediumistic intuition, it could be said that these artists took elements from him without knowing him.
We are in a position to better understand Crevalcorecompared to those who lived one hundred and fifty years ago, because we have seen and we have within us artists of the twentieth century: the two aforementioned, but also the surrealists, the new objectivity, which have made explicit the solitary intuitions explicit and far over time, but close in the spirit, of Antonio da Crevalcore.
The idea of the sphere, which in Magritte occurs very often, as well as in De Chirico, “born” in Crevalcore. It is a reversed procedure. If we were not, today, children of metaphysics and surrealism, we would be less grateful to the greatness of Antonio da Crevalcore. From here, a second reason for historical artistic relevance is generated, a vitality, which makes it contemporary to us.
Death dead … sacred
In this Cancellation of emotions and feelings, in this reduction of saints and Madonnas to Sassi, to objects, to still lifeshe prefigures that shutdown of the religious motif, that “death of God”, which characterize a lot of part of modern painting. For this reason, one cannot fail to look at his works without restlessness and admiration.
Let’s take The Madonna, St. Peter and San Paolo who are like a wall found of Schifanoia, probably painted for a church in Bologna. In them the painter gives voice to all the whims, within obliged subjects, renouncing those elements of humanization of Francesco Del Cossa, extremely extremes the Ferrarese component and in particular of Cosmè Tura.
Antonio Leonelli called Antonio da Crevalcore: “San Pietro” (c. 1488-1489).
The peak of his unbridled imagination is touched with the San Pietroabout two meters for two. The drapery is extreme, as in the Eelent of Roberti di Schifanoia, the sculptural face is linked to Niccolò dell’Arca, the largest sculptor of the fifteenth century together with Donatello, Bolognese master of Michelangelo Buonarroti.
There is a ruined architecture, beyond which you can see an extraordinary landscape. But the most singular thing is The artist’s signature, identifiable in scattered letters, as in an anagramon the sarcophagus at the bottom of the painting. This idea was the main theme of the poetics of the Dadaists.
Modernity in the ‘400
Tristan Tzara (French poet and essayist), illustrating to his disciples how the true lyric poetry had to beadvised to take a sheet of newspaper, cut out letters and words, put them in a bag, shake them well, then extract them and compose a poem.
Well, This had already done so, in the eighties of the fifteenth century, Crevalcorewho, with great irony, broke his name: in that plaque there are all the letters that serve to decipher his name. Here is what point of intellectualism, metaphysics, surrealism and bizarre can touch a painter of great modernity, despite being an ancient painter. Confirming my thesis that There is often much more force of invention and future in some ancient works than in some modern works.
All articles by Vittorio Sgarbi
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