TRAMANDO

The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, MAMbo and the Museo Morandi pay tribute to Francesco Arcangeli, a seminal figure in 20th-century art history and criticism, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death.

Francesco Arcangeli worked with Cesare Gnudi and Andrea Emiliani during the years when they were in charge at the Pinacoteca, and he was the director of the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna – now the MAMbo – from 1958 to 1968.

The exhibitions presented in all three museums reflect his idea of continuity between the art of the past and that of the present, and specially selected works are accompanied by excerpts from his writings.

The words of Francesco Arcangeli that visitors will find along the itinerary here are taken from the catalogue of the exhibition Nature and Expression in Bolognese-Emilian Art, which was held at the Archiginnasio in the autumn of 1970.

In this exhibition, which brought together and summarised the studies and research of a lifetime, Arcangeli outlined an interpretation of Emilian and Bolognese art which has since become indispensable. It favoured the more expressive and popular component in the works, based on ancient peasant roots in an all-encompassing “relationship, at once remote and unconditioned, with the world of nature”.

Expanding on Roberto Longhi’s interpretation, Arcangeli clearly drew out this aspect in contrast to the cultivated one associated with the classic tradition, which had already been extensively studied, and

made the hitherto-neglected art of a territory, of a “province” as he called it, the protagonist.

The crucial connection between art and nature distinguished, according to Archangeli, the development of artists – from Wiligelmo to Morandi – who had been born in the same places but in different ages. They showed stylistic “constants” and embodied the essential character of a land with which Arcangeli identified and which represented his own community. The path runs in an unbroken line, crossing time and connecting past and present, without distinctions of artistic periods or eras. But its passages are marked by the re-emergence of a hidden thread of thought, of an unconscious affinity in worldview, of an “unconscious tradition of customs and life” that Arcangeli called the ‘tramando’.

The long story unfolds over eight centuries, featuring artists who, ever in “revolt” against the intellectual or academic superstructures of their time, “drew their strength from roots that were more broadly human than the culture that surrounded them... spontaneously rejecting certainties of any kind, in order to espouse the passion for human beings and things, passing time and the changing seasons, the ‘here and now’ of life”.

Archangeli’s exhibition began with the reliefs of Modena Cathedral (evoked with photographic reproductions) sculpted in the early 12th century by Wiligelmo. Far removed from any mystical construction, in his work the human body is represented as, and felt to be, a pure physical entity. After Wiligelmo the show then moved on to the 14th century and Vitale da Bologna’s ‘slices of life’, his sudden and violent representations in a space that overflows the boundaries of the painting, in contrast to the measured compositions of Tuscan painting. Arcangeli detected an equally expressive power in Jacopino di Francesco and Andrea de’ Bartoli, while, for the period straddling the 15th and 16th centuries, he chose Amico Aspertini, whose bizarre imagination subverted the Renaissance canons of harmony and

balance epitomised by his contemporary Francesco Francia. In the first half of the 17th century, it was Ludovico Carracci who expressed the most vivid feeling of popular religious devotion, depicting sacred events in an intimate, everyday space. Ludovico was followed by the spontaneous paintings of Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose scenes of everyday life appear to follow the heart, rather than the mind, to the point of seeming ‘proto-Romantic’. Rounding off the exhibition was Giorgio Morandi who, with his rare landscapes and still lifes, painted or engraved, represented for Arcangeli the end of this journey of an art deeply connected to life.

Nature and Expression was a particularly significant exhibition for the history of the Pinacoteca because it explored Emilian and Bolognese art from a new perspective. Thanks to the continuous exchanges between Arcangeli and the then Superintendent Cesare Gnudi, this helped to define the project for the radical redevelopment and redesign of the museum, the cornerstones of which are still in place today.