THE OLD ROAD from Milan runs north-east, past Gorgonzola to cross the river Adda at Vaprio, where a number of prominent Milanese families built villas that have changed relatively little since Bernardo Bellotto recorded these in the 1740s. Beyond, the road turns somewhat northwards for the last fifteen kilometres to Bergamo, which from 1428 until 1797 was the western outpost of Venetian territory.
The upper town, the Città Alta, is as satisfying as any of its size in northern Italy, its plan dictated by the strategic promontory which its defences exploit. The logical place to begin is the central Piazza Vecchia, overlooked by the palazzo of the Podestà Veneto, the local governor. Walk through the portico of the Palazzo della Ragione into the Piazza del Duomo. On the left is the not very appealing cathedral, ahead the flank of the magnificent Santa Maria Maggiore, with the façade of the adjoining Cappella Colleoni. Designed by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo and built in 1472–6, this domed monument to the great condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni is perhaps the purest achievement of the Lombard Renaissance. In the eighteenth century the interior was enriched with a series of canvasses by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and others. The elaborate classical decoration of the façade contrasts with the Gothic porch of the church. The interior is lavishly decorated with tapestries and an exceptional baroque confessional. The choir stalls have no equal. The intarsia panels, with scenes from the Old Testament, were designed by no less a genius than Lorenzo Lotto. For Sir John Reresby, writing in 1654, ‘they would pass for painted by some extraordinary hand’. And nowhere are the wayward eccentricities of that most individual of Venetian Renaissance masters more evident than in these inventive designs.
Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, the Colleoni Chapel, 1472–6.
Lotto worked in and around Bergamo on a number of occasions between 1516 and 1533. Because his stature was not properly recognized until the appearance of Berenson’s monograph in 1894, there was no incentive for the French to appropriate pictures by him. To see two closely related masterpieces of 1521, descend from the Città Alta to the palazzo-lined Via Pignolo. Go first to Santo Spirito. Lotto’s altarpiece is on the fourth altar on the right. The Madonna and Child are enthroned between four saints with the infant Baptist below and a wonderfully animated semi-circle of youthful angels above. The glowing eloquence of Lotto’s colour is matched by the energy of his characterization. Uphill, in the relatively modest San Bernardino in Pignolo, is the later of the two pictures, again a sacra conversazione with the Madonna and Child and four saints, but with a recording angel in place of the Baptist and four flying child angels holding a canopy above the throne. Of the two pictures, this is the more concentrated masterpiece.
Higher up the Via Pignolo is the turn on the right for the Accademia Carrara, one of the most distinguished museums of its scale in Italy. Among the components of the collection are the pictures acquired by the pioneer of the art of attribution, Giovanni Morelli, including one of Bellini’s most perfect Madonnas. Naturally artists who worked in the city are well represented: Andrea Previtali and Giovanni Cariani; Lotto with his beautiful, if truncated, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine and the wonderfully animated predella panels of 1516 from his great altarpiece in the church of San Bartolommeo in the lower town; Moroni with a dozen of the portraits that record the patrons of mid-sixteenth century Brescia and Bergamo with such determined objectivity; and his early eighteenth-century successor Fra Galgario with some two dozen canvasses, including the refreshingly unsentimental Young Painter. The careers of both Moroni and Fra Galgario demonstrate that, subject to Venice as this was, Bergamo was no artistic backwater.