METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: GALLERIA 608: North Italian Sixteenth-Century Painting

Speranza

In the sixteenth century, the northern cities of Milan, Brescia, Parma, Bologna, and Ferrara made crucial contributions to the history of European art, despite their turbulent political histories. Brescia had been absorbed into the Venetian state in 1426; Bologna lost its independence in 1506, becoming part of the Papal States; in 1525 Milan definitively lost its independence to the Habsburgs; and in 1545 the pope transformed Parma into an independent duchy ruled by the Farnese family. Ferrara remained independent under the Este dukes until 1598, when it, too, passed to the papacy. The two greatest painters were Parmigianino, an exponent of Mannerism, and Correggio, whose exploration of the world of ecstatic emotion laid the basis for the style we know as Baroque. Moretto da Brescia's insistence on the close study of posed models and nature became a reference point for Caravaggio, who was trained in Milan. Moretto's compatriot and sometime collaborator Girolamo Romanino embraced a raw expressivity much influenced by the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, and Giovanni Battista Moroni was the defining portraitist of the Counter-Reformation.