It's when I return to Urbino that I enter a sort of fairytale dimension that reminds me not only of my youth. "The gods have ensured that life is hidden from men," said Hesiod. We are not the masters of the steam; we often lead lives that are not our own, and we only understand this at the end of the game, when the hard work is done, and we long to start all over again, even if we don't know exactly how. Urbino and its palace give me the dimension of the story of a power and its defeat, of men who seize but then, like everyone else, are destined to abandon, of triumph but also of fall. What is left in the end? Art.
Art passes from museum to museum, from house to house, from one owner to another, and betrays its message. And that's no small thing. If each of us could leave a Piero della Francesca before meeting the Eternal Father, I'm sure he would grant us a lesser sentence to serve before crossing the threshold of Heaven.
Urbino is now a guarantee, I tell myself. It's one of the few places in the Marche region capable of competing with major museums like Florence or Venice. It's moving for its incredible ability to narrate and promote art, with a sense of self-awareness that makes it independent and separate from a certain provincialism that pervades the rest of the region. Urbino is something else, and when I say that, I mean the other described by Paolo Volponi in his books, by Baldassar Castiglioni, by Leon Battista Alberti through his architecture, or by Raphael. The list of artists is incredibly long, so much so that it makes me wonder who the God is who illuminated this small town nestled among the high hills of the Cesane, where, among other things, Gino Girolomoni's Elce Nero lived and thundered.
This exhibition by Simone Cantarini (born in Pesaro in 1612 and died in Verona in 1648) is a surprising one, dedicated to a surprising painter. A painter from Pesaro, but always tied to Urbino, he lived on the brink of the temporal collapse of his dukedom. Indeed, we are witnessing the handover of the keys by Della Rovere, now without heirs, to papal power. He was not an easy painter, despite his smug hand, and nevertheless a complex man, in some ways Caravaggesque, with a strong and always controversial personality, searching for a self that was already evident, only he couldn't see it, as happens with many. Curious for a painter, isn't it? Perhaps had he lived longer, we would have witnessed his true metamorphosis, the total liberation from the patterns and dictates imparted as irrefutable laws by certain schools, vaguely perceptible in his last works before his mysterious death.
What is art, after all? It's the language of the soul, which is why its greatest power lies in the surprise that disorients: its mission is to shatter the banal, first and foremost that which belongs to the painter. As I wander through the rooms of the meticulously curated exhibition, I like to think that every time Cantarini picked up a paintbrush, he was trying to challenge everything he had been taught until then. His mentor, Guido Reni, called him ungrateful. And Cantarini ended up portraying him in a confused, almost embarrassing way for the great artist he was: tired and old, with a lost expression, and in fact incapable of truly appreciating the genius of his pupil. Perhaps he was jealous?
What I notice about Simone Cantarini is that he's a great portraitist. I'm astonished by Eleonora Albani Tomasi, by her penetrating, snarling gaze, so different from the usual noblewomen of the time. The fact that she's wearing an apron doesn't discourage me from thinking she must have possessed great character, not at all humble despite holding a wooden rosary in her hands. I'm not fooled by this gesture: I even have the feeling that a strange little spirit is whispering something in her left ear and that she's listening, and voilà, the reason for that expression! I try to photograph it several times and I see something like two eyes and a slanted head: a petulant, malicious spirit, which puts her to attention.
Eleonora was sixty-three at the time of the portrait, a noblewoman accustomed to the unpredictability of life and to taking charge of it. It's a modern portrait that leaves no room for dreams but for control of what she possesses. That rosary could be an abacus—after all, her family is very powerful. If she hadn't been veiled, I would have sworn she was a man.
The feeling is that Simone Cantarini knows he is a painter but also knows he doesn't really know his soul, this is why he is restless, in portraying himself he slips a pencil and a notebook between his fingers: if he really has to be an artist then he is first of all a poet, and this is why in certain canvases we find hints of his verses and his other self is portrayed while he slips the brush and colours between the fingers of a young woman, his side taken from the side, as if taken by surprise, in a hidden way.
Then there are the various versions of Saint Jerome, lost in the desert but rediscovered in the words of God, those of the young Barberini, undecided on how to portray him. He is a powerful contemporary, entrusted with the duchy, and wants to immortalize him in various aspects, all equally important. If one doesn't work, he immediately gives him another, and then another. After all, he has learned how to juggle, and perhaps this is what annoys his master.
In the end, the most interesting part of the exhibition comes at the end, with the subjects being less pronounced, almost sketched. Perhaps a precursor of modern painting? It's said that every painter passes the torch to someone else, just as Raphael continued Perugino and Titian continued Giorgione, and for me, what ultimately remains of this artist is his perceptiveness, which automatically makes him a forerunner, a precursor of moderate modernity.
