Burrini, Crespi, Creti, Gandolfi

The eighteenth century bolognese in the Collections of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna

The exhibition, curated by Angelo Mazza, ideally accomplishes the exhibition project started last year at the headquarters of the Carisbo Foundation, which featured the works of Reni, Guercino, Cantarini, Pasinelli and other painters of the first magnitude in the glorious seventeenth century bolognese. In the selective review of the works of the eighteenth century Bolognese of the Art and History Collections of the Foundation, the solemn start is given by five canvases by Giovanni Antonio Burrini, irregular and anti-academic painter: the large painting with Count Fabio Albergati portrayed by the court painter while paying tribute to Philip II King of Spain and the four large oval portraits with illustrious personalities linked to the history of the Albergati

.The reference to tradition, however, is reiterated by the Amoroso incontro di Rinaldo e Armida by Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole, a refined pupil of Lorenzo Pasinelli, who proposes in the two figures ideals of aristocratic beauty, and the baroque grace of Giuseppe Marchesi known as Samson, a pupil of Aureliano Milani and then of Marcantonio Franceschini, author of an altar painting destined for a private oratory.

The protagonist of the artistic scene in Bologna in the first half of the eighteenth century, however, is Donato Creti, enfant prodige, who at the age of about sixteen-seventeen delivers a self-portrait psychic to Count Alessandro Fava his protector and, a few years later, exhausted by anguish and depressive crises, pl