Exhibition of Italian Baroque painter opens in Tallinn

Text Susanna Poikela

Photo Art Museum of Estonia

Bernardo Strozzi’s studio. Concert. Ca 1635–1638. Oil. Art Museum of Estonia

A major international exhibition featuring works by the great Italian early Baroque master Bernardo Strozzi will open at the Kadriorg Art Museum on 29 March. The exhibition is entitled Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Caravaggio. The exhibition features 40 works by Strozzi from European museums and private collections, including works that have never been publicly exhibited before. The exhibition is curated by Strozzi expert and curator Anna Orlando, and Greta Koppel.

Most of the works in the exhibition come from the collections of Strozzi’s hometown of Genoa and more widely from northern Italy, individual works from collections in the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and France, but the work that will arrive in Estonia in particular as a result of great effort is the artist’s painting from his Venetian period, Saint Peter Healing a Crippled Beggar, which is from the National Art Gallery in Lviv.

Bernardo Strozzi (1582–1644), a painter with a spiritual background, was one of the most popular artists in Genoa and Venice during his lifetime, a virtuoso in religious sacred images as well as secular portraits, scenes and still lifes. He also mastered various painting and drawing techniques.

“Strozzi stands out in art history as an open and observant artist who was able to skillfully synthesise new artistic impulses and impressions into his own personal style, the hallmarks of which are fidelity to the original, and a vigorous painting style,” describes curator Greta Koppel, believing that Strozzi has remained in Caravaggio’s shadow for a long time, and unjustifiably.

The exhibition Bernardo Strozzi: Beyond Carvaggio is the first collaboration between the Kadriorg Art Museum and Genoese museums and private collections, made possible by the exhibition’s Italian curator and internationally renowned expert on Bernardo Strozzi’s art, Anna Orlando. Orlando expresses her satisfaction with the collaborative project:

“The greatest goal of an art historian is to make the results of his research available to a wider audience. Therefore, the current exhibition is the achievement of a very important goal for me, as I have been able to make the works of one of the most significant Genoese masters and the Genoese school of painting of his time known internationally. I feel that I am an ambassador of Genoese culture and beauty!”

Strozzi’s work has only been exhibited outside of Italy once, in 1995 in Baltimore, USA. The impetus for the exhibition was Bernardo Strozzi’s painting, Concert, which is in the collection of the Art Museum of Estonia and comes from the collection of the Liphartite Raadi Manor. In the wake of the decision to conserve the painting, it was also decided to start preparing this exhibition. The exhibition is open at the Kadriorg Art Museum until 6 July. For more information, please visit the Kadriorg Art Museum’s website.

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