Cinquecento rediscovered · National Gallery of Ireland
Bacchiacca - Virgin and Child with St John the BaptistFrancesco Salviati - The Holy Family
From January 29 to May 8, 2022 the National Gallery of Ireland presents an exhibition of eight Italian Cinquecento paintings, recently restored by the Head of Conservation at the Gallery.
Images: Bacchiacca (1494-1557), "Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist". Photo © National Gallery of Ireland ·· Francesco Salviati, "The Holy Family," c.1543-1548. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland
The exhibition -free admission- is the result of restoration work carried out over more than a decade by Simone Mancini, Head of Conservation at the Gallery, who explained that these works provided "a considerable amount of information on Renaissance pictorial practices and processes."
The works included in the exhibition depict the Virgin and her infant son, Jesus Christ, along with St. John the Baptist. Under the original -and surely also somewhat controversial- title of "Christ & His Cousin: Renaissance Rediscoveries," these paintings, as the Gallery explains in a press release, "tell the story of an imaginary encounter between a young Christ and his cousin , a meeting not referenced in the Bible."
In contrast to the hieratic and "rigid" figures present in many religious scenes of previous centuries, the works in the exhibition -which includes artists such as Giovanni Antonio Sogliani (1492-1544), Francesco Salviati (1510-1563) or Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi, known as Bacchiacca (1494-1557)- show an appreciable attention to human emotions and behavior. In the words of Dr. Aoife Brady, curator of Italian and Spanish art at the National Gallery of Ireland, the works invite "to look a little harder at what are often dismissed as conventional, religious images, and to think about the traditions and cultures that underpin these lively and quirky compositions."

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