Investigations about Giovanni Serodine, Exhibition Estense Gallery, Modena

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Investigations about Giovanni Serodine

From 25 March to 26 June 2022

Estense Gallery

Largo Porta Sant'Agostino, 337, Modena

Closed today: open tomorrow at 08:30

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The Estensi Galleries host from March 25 to June 26, 2022 a dossier exhibition that focuses on one of the most enigmatic paintings of the seventeenth century in its collections: the Santo scrivente, which has been part of Giovanni Serodine's catalog (Rome, 1600-1630) for over a century, among the greatest and most original followers of Caravaggio. A fragmentary and partly compromised painting, which returns to the public after a long restoration process supported by in-depth diagnostic investigations. For the first time in its history, it will be exhibited at the Galleria Estense in Modena alongside its ancient copy, which reproduces its original appearance, coming from the Museum of the Certosa di Pavia. This copy is accompanied by two other works of identical format attributed to another Caravaggio painter, Giuseppe Vermiglio (Milan, ca. 1587 - Turin?, post 1635). They depict "San Paolo Eremita" and "San Giovanni Battista", and are what remains of a cycle of "six paintings representing hermits in the desert" still recorded at the Foresteria Nobile of the Certosa in the late eighteenth century. The project was born from a precise idea: to study a work altered by heavy interventions since ancient times through the technical tools of diagnostics and restoration, but also with the historical-artistic tools offered by the context of the paintings of the Certosa, until now little known and never investigated. In this case, the challenge was motivated primarily by the name of Giovanni Serodine, whose "Santo scrivente" is one of the very few works belonging to an Italian state museum. Although he does not belong to the most well-known artists by the general public, he is an absolute standout in the already dizzying panorama of painters active in Rome in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century and heirs in various ways of Caravaggio's dazzling season. Serodine was the son of that centuries-old and fruitful tradition of painters, sculptors, and architects who came from Italian Switzerland to work in Rome. He died very young and only touched upon by contemporary documents and seventeenth-century artistic biographies, he was brought back to his exceptional stature by the greatest Italian art historian of the twentieth century, Roberto Longhi. An artist intimately linked to the naturalism of Caravaggesque origin, from which he developed a personal and dramatic language entrusted to color applied in strokes and patches, recognized by his contemporaries for its quality but criticized for its unrestrained nonconformism. This was one of the reasons that determined his critical misfortune, in an era when official painting was much more attentive to the "decorum" with which subjects were depicted, and to the "design" with which they were studied at length before being painted.

From 21 July to 4 October 2026

Rebel Muses. Women, image, power in the history of art

Former Church of Santo Stefano, Mondovì

From 31 March to 6 September 2026

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, also known as il Sodoma.

Accorsi-Ometto Museum of Decorative Arts, Turin

	opens - closes	last entry
monday	24:00 - 24:00
tuesday	08:30 - 19:30
wednesday	08:30 - 19:30
thursday	08:30 - 19:30
friday	08:30 - 19:30
saturday	08:30 - 19:30
sunday	14:00 - 19:30

Investigations about Giovanni Serodine

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