BOLOGNA is not the most immediately lovable of major Italian cities. Her enduring prosperity is partly due to her position at the point of the Via Emilia where the historic route over the Futa Pass from Florence debouches from the Apennines to the vast plain of the Po. And to understand Bologna it is best to approach from the successors of the Via Emilia: from the Via Ugo Bassi to the Piazza Porta Ravegnana, which overlie the decumanus of what was already a major town. With the collapse of the Roman empire, Bologna’s importance dwindled, only to recover dramatically in the period after 1164, when she joined the Lombard League. The struggle between the empire and the papacy was finally resolved in favour of the latter. When the signoria of the Bentivoglio family was suppressed in 1506, papal rule was ruthlessly reimposed. This, contrary to what might be supposed, ensured the consistent wealth that made it possible for Bologna to support the most influential school of painters in post-Renaissance Italy. Their achievement was what attracted most northern travellers to visit Bologna in the age of the Grand Tour. And as Ruskin was the high priest of the generation that dismissed the Carracci, Reni and their followers, it is appropriate that another Briton, Sir Denis Mahon, did more than anyone else to rehabilitate their reputation in the twentieth century.
The Carracci would recognize much of the centre of Bologna: the brick arcades of the streets, which Sir Denis also loved, benign alike in rain and sun; the two leaning towers, the Torre degli Asinelli and the Torre Garisenda, already seen as symbols of the city; the major public buildings that flank the Piazza Maggiore; and not least, dominating the latter, the monumental façade of the cathedral, San Petronio, with the wonderful doorway by the Sienese Jacopo della Quercia, whose bas-reliefs express at once the lyricism and the languor of the late Gothic. In the adjacent Piazza Fontana is a later masterpiece, the bronze Fountain of Neptune completed in 1566 by another brilliant outsider, Jean de Boulogne, for whom it earned the name by which we know him, Giambologna.
Giambologna, Fontana di Nettuno, bronze, 1566.
Although Bologna could claim a notable indigenous school of painters and miniaturists, her patrons were never parochial. The career of the late fifteenth-century sculptor Niccolò da Bari, otherwise Niccolò dell’Arca, perfectly illustrates this. An arch in the portal of the south-east corner of the Piazza Maggiore leads to the narrow Via Clovature, with, on the left, Santa Maria della Vita. To the right of the high altar is Niccolò’s extraordinary terracotta group of the Pietà, almost northern in dramatic tension.
Niccolò owed his sobriquet to his contribution to the arca of Saint Dominic in the great basilica of San Domenico, 250 metres to the south, reached more directly from the second turning to the right off the Via Clavature. The church was begun in 1221, the year of the saint’s death, and the façade, although restored, is original. The Dominicans were determined patrons. Giunta Pisano supplied the great Crucifix in a chapel off the left aisle, while Nicola Pisano, who relied in part on assistants, executed the reliefs of the saint’s tomb in his chapel on the right. Two hundred years later, in 1469, Niccolò da Bari was called in to supply a cimasa with free-standing statues. His candelabrum-bearing angel on the left is among the most delicate sculptures of the Quattrocento, and is not outshone by the pendant supplied in 1494 by the youthful Michelangelo. The later decoration of the chapel is also remarkable, with Guido Reni’s powerful Apotheosis of Saint Dominic in the cove of the apse.
From the Piazza Porta Ravegnana, the Via Zamboni runs at a diagonal to the grid of the early town. On the right is one of Bologna’s major churches, San Giacomo Maggiore, another thirteenth-century foundation. At the east end is the Bentivoglio Chapel, consecrated in 1486. The altarpiece is by the most influential painter of Renaissance Bologna, Francesco Francia, who was trained as a goldsmith and evolved a restrained classical style. The murals of the lateral walls, in one of which Giovanni II Bentivoglio and his family appear, are by his equally accomplished contemporary, Lorenzo Costa.
Three hundred metres beyond the church, on the left, is the Pinacoteca Nazionale. Here you can study the long development of the Bolognese school from the fourteenth century onwards, as well as pictures by artists from elsewhere painted for the city – from the late Giotto altarpiece to Raphael’s heroic Saint Cecilia originally in San Domenico. There are outstanding altarpieces by the three Carracci, Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico, of which Annibale’s early Baptism is the most appealing; these are complemented by familiar masterpieces of Guido Reni – the greatest master of Seicento Bologna – including the majestic Pala dei Mendicanti and the powerful Crucifixion of 1617, and the wonderfully subtle Saint William of Aquitaine by the youthful Guercino. The later Bolognese also repay attention: Creti, particularly on a small scale, is exquisite in touch; Giuseppe Maria Crespi impresses for the humanity of both his genre scenes and his religious commissions; while the Gandolfi leave one in no doubt of their almost physical relish for their chosen medium. The vigour of later Bolognese painting was no isolated phenomenon; this was paralleled in the enduring vitality of the ancient university, where the curious can still see the alarmingly well-observed waxes of foetuses used for instruction in the medical school.
San Domenico: Niccolò dell’Arca, Angel.
