It’s one thing of an Italian Renaissance trope that throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, portray rose in social and mental standing, rating itself alongside the artwork of poetry. Much less identified is that throughout the early 1600s the rapport between the visible and literary arts was dropped at a complete new stage by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino (also called Giovan Battista Marino, 1569-1625). His unprecedented dedication to versifying portray is the topic of an exhibition on the Galleria Borghese, as soon as residence to the artwork patron, and Marino modern, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
The gallery’s exhibition, curated by Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini and Andrea Zezza, goals to determine Marino’s artwork historic centrality, which remains to be under-recognised 4 centuries after his dying. As Zezza says, “After we take into consideration the early Seicento, we take into consideration Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, however in all this Marino had a big position.”
Competing with artists
This position is epitomised within the splendid gallery Marino spent a lot of his peripatetic life dreaming up, as he moved from courtroom to courtroom—from Naples to Rome, Genoa and Turin, ultimately settling in Paris in 1615 earlier than returning to his residence metropolis earlier than his dying—acquainting himself with their artwork collections and a few of Europe’s main artists. The venture would see the sunshine solely in literary kind: Marino’s guide La Galeria (the gallery, 1619) consists of 624 stanzas poeticising—or, as Zezza emphasises, “competing with”—artists and artworks.
“The Renaissance had already fostered a rapport between portray and poetry,” Zezza says. “However Marino created a complete guide devoted to this rapport, at a time when areas devoted solely to viewing artwork—galleries—had been starting to emerge.”
The present will carry collectively early editions of Marino’s books with artworks that relate to them, both instantly or by capturing the essence of his poetic-pictorial imaginative and prescient, as embodied particularly in L’Adone (1623), his richly allegorical, image-strewn retelling of the doomed love affair between Venus and Adonis.
Highlights will embody Tintoretto’s Narcissus (1550s) and Frans Pourbus the Youthful’s portrait of Marino (round 1621), and above all the ultimate room, which is able to discover Marino’s relationship with Nicolas Poussin, whom he met in Paris whereas serving on the courtroom of Marie de’ Medici. Poussin’s Empire of Flora (round 1630-31), Zezza says, “represents the principal themes of Marino’s poetry, which via mythology manifested a form of encyclopaedia of information.”
In a jauntily becoming means, the exhibition will fulfil the poet’s dream, Zezza says: “Marino’s recreation of mirrors, via which he displays pictures in phrases, has became our personal act of mirroring his splendid gallery in the true one made by Scipione Borghese, the poet’s modern.”
• Portray and Poetry within the seventeenth Century: Giovan Battista Marino and the Great Ardour, Galleria Borghese, Rome, 19 November-9 February 2025
