16/3/23 - Acquisition - Bergamo, Accademia Carrara - It is an unforgettable painting that has finally reached the Bergamo collections, while its author was triumphing in Paris, where the Canesso Gallery dedicated a wonderful retrospective to him: the Young Boy with a Basket of Bread and Pastries by Evaristo Baschenis (ill. 1) had already been presented in its walls some ten years ago, on the occasion of the very first exhibition on the Master of the Blue Jeans (see article).
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- 1. Evaristo Baschenis (1617-1677)
Young Boy with a Basket of Bread and Pastries, c. 1650-1660
Oil on canvas - 54 x 73 cm
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara
Photo: Galerie Canesso - See the image in its page
This one succeeds in the feat of "inventing" a new artist, a painter of seventeenth century Genoese reality, while the name of Evaristo Baschenis was known to almost all lovers of Italian painting thanks to a pioneering exhibition held in his native Bergamo in the late 1990s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York soon followed the Accademia Carrara’s lead in 2000-2001 with its own exhibition poetically subtitled "The Music of Silence", but it was not until 2022 and the Galerie Canesso (see article) that the Parisian public could in turn delight in these marvellous paintings. The artist remains quite rare: only about fifty paintings are known to exist, mainly in Italy. A masterpiece such as the beautiful Young Boy with a Basket of Bread and Pastries could never have left the Peninsula and could not find a better home than in the Lombardy museum. From Bergamo to Milan, with a stopover in Rome, it was until recently one of the jewels in the collection of the businessman Mario Scaglia, who acquired it in 1984 and loaned it to Paris in 2010 [1].
Far from the still lifes of musical instruments that made - and still make - the fame of Evaristo Baschenis, we discover here a young boy deliberately shifted to the right of the composition in order to place in the centre a wicker basket overflowing with bread and pastries, among which we recognize ciambelle and savoiardi. One of them, balanced on the edge of the basket, is a perfect expression of the suspended moment the artist represents. Both simple and refined, the layout of the painting is absolutely exquisite, even if one can admire even more the subtlety of the colours chosen by the artist and notice, as Véronique Damian does in her note, the way in which "the white sugar of the pastries competes effortlessly with the flaky pompons of the shirt ties". This delightful painting, which has no real equivalent - the only thing we find is the wicker basket in another composition - in the work of the Lombard artist, is a welcome addition to the rich collections of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, which until now has "only" held four still lifes inspired by music.
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- 2. Collector Mario Scaglia
Photo: Valeria Beltrami - See the image in its page
Also from the city, Mario Scaglia was not content with giving her this masterpiece: the industrialist (ill. 2) had also assembled one of the world’s most important collections of medals and plaques, mostly from the Renaissance. Well advised by his friend Federico Zeri, he was also accompanied by Francesco Rossi, who directed the Accademia Carrara for almost thirty years. The donation is also accompanied by rich documentation, with pieces by Pisanello, Riccio and Pietro Tacca. In 2007-2008, the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan devoted an exhibition to Mario Scaglia’s collection, accompanied by a catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale, which then published two other volumes entirely devoted to medals in 2021. The art historian Giulia Zaccariotto, who collaborated extensively on the latter publication, has recently joined the Accademia Carrara, where she is in charge of the sculpture and decorative arts collections, having previously worked at the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro in Venice and at the Galleria Estense in Modena.