Musei Civici d'Arte Antica

The Museo Civico Medievale, after having presented exhibitions in recent years dedicated to Vitale da Bologna, Simone dei Crocifissi and Jacopo di Paolo, closes the cycle with an exhibition in collaboration with the Basilica di San Petronio, curated by Daniele Benati and Massimo Medica, on one of the key figures of Late Gothic painting in Italy, Giovanni di Pietro Falloppi, better known as Giovanni da Modena.

This is the first exhibition ever dedicated to the artist, born in Modena but Bolognese by adoption, and author of the renowned decoration of the Bolognini Chapel in San Petronio (c. 1411-12), featuring the Last Judgment, the Story of the Magi and the Story of San Petronio, supreme masterpiece of Late Gothic Bolognese painting, which, along with other works present in the church, including the great allegorical frescoes in the Dieci di Balia Chapel (1420), will round out the exhibition.

It will also be an opportunity to compare various works by the painter from museums and private collections – paintings on panel like the San Giacomo, San Pietro, San Francesco and San Nicola da Tolentino (Bologna, Compagnia dei Lombardi), the Madonna and Child (Modena, Museo Civico d'Arte), and another Madonna and Child (Ferrara, Pinacoteca Nazionale); frescoes including the Madonna and Child with Two Angels (Carpi, church of San Francesco), the Virgin and Child (Bologna, church of Santa Maria dei Servi); and miniatures which help reconstruct the painter’s long career, as revealed by the two miniatures in the Statutes of the Drapers’ Guild (1407, Bologna, Museo Civico Medievale) when he is first documented in Bologna, where he would remain until the 1450s, as evidenced by the tempera of San Bernardino (1451, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale).

For nearly four decades, Giovanni da Modena dominated Bolognese artistic culture, helping it to keep in step with the International Gothic style, which he interpreted in a highly personal variant whose powerful and immediate expressivity also ties it to the previous local tradition. This is demonstrated in his earliest Bolognese works, most of them tied to the construction site of San Petronio, which, along with the presence of the court of the new pope, elected in 1410, attracted numerous artists to Bologna from out of town.

This was in fact the ‘Antipope’ John XXIII, born Baldassare Cossa, who had become Legate of the city by 1403, a circumstance that certainly would have had an impact on Bologna’s artistic culture by fostering the emergence of an illustrious and powerful patron eager to own sumptuously illuminated manuscripts, a genre to which Giovanni da Modena had devoted himself during his career, as demonstrated by several examples on display.

The painter’s work is also investigated through its rich dialogue with the new ideas emerging from the San Petronio site, where the works of non-native sculptors (e.g. Alberto da Campione, Jacopo della Quercia) explored alternative systems of spatial representation with respect to the scientific perspective of the the Florentine school.