INTERVIEW TO ZAMPETTI
by Tiziana Marozzi
Pietro Zampetti doesn’t need to be introduced. He’s one of the flagmen of the culture of Marche, as well as a great teacher of History of Art, in a time director of the Beautiful Arts of Venice and professor in the University of Urbino, in which he also directed the school of improvement of Art History, and later director of the Regional Center for the Cultural Goods, as well as author of innumerable texts among which the monumental “Painting in Marche”, published by Nardini in four volumes in 1988. This section of the collection on the art of Marche, that also includes the architecture (Mariano, 1995) and the sculpture, with which Zampetti himself had dealt (1993), is really essential for who wants to approach the matter, because it reflects, as it emphasized Carlo Bo in the presentation of the first volume, all the activity of the studious and his first vocation of inhabitant of Marche. The voice of this scholar has been raised in many occasions against the public stupidity in national newspapers like Il Corriere della Sera, indicating the necessity of restorations and of interventions getting involved in the values of the artistic culture, looking for and defending the truth for a thousand times – as it’s understood also when reading the letters and writings gathered in his autobiography “The years, the days, the hours”, published by Motta (2000) – overall in relation to the so close Venice and Ancona or bold prefaces (see the one that’s in the square of the Pope of Ancona of Fabio Mariano, 1993). His voice constitutes, in many cases, the historical memory of so many events of the history of the art of Marche, at the moment buried, settled and not documented. His works give a glimpse of an unmistakable element, a methodologist approach little common today, that’s to say, the observation and the study of the work of art like creation of the man, gathered not exclusively through iconographical – iconological instruments, but through the study of the colour, the ‘physicity’ of the picture. His studies on Crivelli, Lotto, Tiziano or Veronese, Tiepolo (he was who in a study of 1964, in Arte Veneta, attributed to him the altarpiece of the church of Camerino), as well as on Carpaccio, Bellini and Guardi who are still of great actuality. One of his greater merits is being the first in intuiting the importance of the so called School of Camerino of the 15th Century, which was remembered in a basic exhibition in Venice in 1961, in which the attention of the international critic was put on these masterpieces, nowadays universally recognized, but then almost completely unknown.
We wanted to have him in quality of expert to ask him his opinion about the exhibition in Camerino, recently closed, defining the question between final and interrogatory question marks still opened.
- The exhibition of Camerino reveals the problem of constructing a new history of the Art of Marche regarding the already drawn up from 1988 in the four volumes dedicated to the “Painting in Marche”. What do you think of the hypotheses exposed till now?.
- The exhibition, put in scene well in the recovered spaces of the monumental complex of Saint Dominique, full of beautiful pieces, is substantially positive because it puts the attention on a little well-known civilization. I cannot, nevertheless, accept the critics, which are enunciated in the catalogue, made by Andrea de Marchi and Gianna Tiempo Lopez. It seems to me that it exists a great confusion on such an important argument related to the region of the Adriatic Renaissance. In this sense, the one in charge of the Historical and Artistic Goods of Marche, Paolo Dal Poggetto, has taken distances from the organizers in the preface of the catalogue.
- Leaving apart the problem of identity of Carlo of Camerino – Olivuccio of Ciccarello, that doesn’t have anything to do with Camerino but with the painting of Ancona; it’s widely treated the subject of the painting of the 15th Century in Camerino.
-After Arcangelo di Cola, the top of the courtesan gothic, present in Florence at the same time as Gentile, in the years in which Masaccio initiated the humanistic revolution with the fresco paintings of the Brancacci chapel; the pictorial world of Camerino was bound to history, mainly by two painters: Girolamo di Giovanni and Giovanni Boccati, until Federico Zeri in the text “Two paintings, the philology and a name: the Master of the Barberini paintings” published in 1961, added to them the name of Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio. Leaving apart Frai Carnevale, he attributed them the paintings of the ducal Palace of Urbino, that later passed to the Barberini collection and later on emigrated to America. It’s known from long ago that the relations of the court of Camerino with the one of Urbino of the Montefeltro were narrow not only by kinship reasons. It was Rotondi who discovered them in the room of The Angels, called the Picta room, of the ducal palace of Urbino by the hand of Giovanni Boccati. But leaving to a side the capable Boccati, on whose personality arise new relevant aspects, the catalogue faces and wants to undo the union Girolamo di Giovanni – Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio, the first defined as “Maestro delle Macchie”, while the second one is called the author of the Annunciazione di Sperimento.
-The suggestive church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, well-known like Santa Maria delle Macchie, of Gagliole, the original Romanesque complex to which has been added the gothic church with the older fresco paintings of the esanatoliens which date from the XIV to XVI centuries in which it can be read the different languages from the pictorial schools of San Severino, Camerino and Fabriano. If I’m not mistaken, he was the one who in 1964 introduced the alias “Maestro delle Macchie”. Who was him and who was then Girolamo di Giovanni?.
-In the abovementioned hermit’s church, full of fresco paintings, are present many hands: it isn’t therefore possible to assign to a sole artist the Announcing Angel and the Virgin, that have a refined late gothic taste in the style of Lorenzo d’Alessandro, and the Virgin of the Milk, that presents a proto-Renaissance style. The artist known as Maestro delle Macchie is referred (cat. 69-70) as Girolamo di Giovanni. What a confusion!. Not by chance the writing that you mentioned is titled “ A hermit’s church and a pictorial anthology” due to the presence of many artist, some of them commendable, between who is Luce Signorelli or one of his immediate collaborators.
In the cycle of fresco paintings of the abbey of San Biagio of Piobbico, near Sarnano, several hands are also present. A careful reading allows safe forward - steps to know thoroughly the painting at Camerino at the 15th Century. For example, the appointments about the fresco painting of 1449, executed in the church of San Agostino of Camerino and other paintings, yet to verify, with some paintings of the hermit’s church of San Lorenzo of Fiastra, no less, the ones related to the passion, death and resurrection of Christ that have been forgotten, which are between the most outstanding of all the region and of the end of the 13th Century, which superimposes to the paintings of the 15th Century of several authors.
-Why did they then destroy the figure of Girolamo di Giovanni, author of the Virgin of the Mercy of Tedico and the Polittico of Monte San Martino, transforming him in the exhibition into the Maestro delle Macchie?.
-Although the fresco painting of Camerino of 1449 is due to him, being previous to the documented paduan period, it’s yet to be demonstrated that he and the successive painters of Camerino who went to Padua in 1450 and the successive years contributed with the painting of light to the school of Squarcione and to all Padua. Should this fresco painting of 1449 be of Girolamo di Giovanni or of Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio is a less excellent question than the other, that’s to say, that Camerino in those days knew, with the certain impulse of Piero della Francesca, the painting of light and space with perspective, offering it even to Crivelli himself, who arrived to Marche in 1446, but not to Camerino until 1488.
He wrote much about Venetian painting in Marche, because of the didactic activity developed near the Athenian of Urbino, or of the institutional positions carried out in Veneto or Marche, and in addition, he organized diverse and significant exhibitions from the one in Ancona in 1950. In the autobiography “The years, the days, the hours”, he specifically says to have wanted to dedicate that exhibition to the art from Veneto present in the region “to deepen in the knowledge of the relations and the bows of union not only between Ancona and Venice but of all the Adriatic coastal, including the Eastern one, from Zara to Ragusa”, the region that he would call Adriatic culture. In 1953 all the existing paintings of Lorenzo Lotto were exposed for the first time in Marche and due to the success of the event was organized a great Venetian exhibition dedicated to the painter.
The subject of the relations between Marche and Venice already presents in Amico Ricci (Venetian by maternal side, one of the Vendramin family), was treated in that exhibition dedicated to the Venetian Painting, that took place in the Palace of the Anziani of Ancona in the immediate postwar period, very admired by Berenson, Longhi, Morassi, Wittengens, to which Palluchini dedicated an excellent study in Arte Veneta.
It has also to be remembered, since they don’t exist reviews in the catalogue, that later, in 1961, Venice dedicated one of its famous exhibitions to Crivelli and the Crivelli’s followers, very admired by Longhi who praised it in Paragone. Nevertheless, they’re also present at it Boccati, Girolamo di Giovanni, Lorenzo d’Alessandro, Ludovico Urbani. Finally, in a test of 1977 on “Padua and Camerino, a pictorial conjuncture of the 15th Century”, published in Notizie da Palazzo Albani, it was widely boarded the subject of the relations between the two cities. They speak extensively about the Master of Patullo.
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