The exhibition "D'après Leonardo", which is part of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (Anchiano, 1452 - Amboise, 1519), presents to the public two masterpieces from the Cerruti Collection, part of the Collections of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art: Madonna and Child (c. 1516) by Leonardo's pupil, Marco d'Oggiono (Milan, c. 1465-1470 - Milan or Oggiono , before June (1524), and Untitled (La Gioconda ) (1992) by Gino De Dominicis (Ancona, 1947 - Rome, 1998).
Through the episodes of d'Oggiono and De Dominicis , the exhibition - curated by Laura Cantone and Fabio Cafagna , art historians responsible for the Cerruti Collection at the Castello di Rivoli - tells the legacy of Leonardo and the uninterrupted fortune of his work : from the legacy of inventions to the workshop and its most trusted students to contemporary recoveries, demonstrating how, even in today's art, artists continue to come to terms with his work.
The painting Madonna and Child (c. 1516) by Marco d'Oggiono is a key work in the painter's artistic career. In the table, which represents Mary as she gently supports Jesus, the two faces touch each other in an intimate gesture, emerging from a uniform black background, against which the candid incarnation of the Child and the warm colors of the Virgin's dress stand out. The refined color scheme, which goes from the red of the tunic to the orange of the mantle and the aqua green of the lining, is enriched by the transparent veil that surrounds Maria's head, whose golden flashes, obtained at the tip of the brush, pretend precious embroidery.
The general composition of the painting is inspired by the famous Madonna Litta (c. 1490) of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg , a work that the Russian museum attributes to Leonardo, but which Italian scholars probably believe was made by a pupil - perhaps by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or by Marco d'Oggiono himself - starting from an original invention by the master. The iconography of the Madonna Litta had a great success in the workshop of d'Oggiono, however, among the known examples, the one in the Cerruti Collection stands out for its high quality. The dating of the work can be traced back to around 1516, a moment in which the Milanese painter started a phase of profound reflection on the master's painting.
The Untitled (La Gioconda) (1992) by Gino De Dominicis belongs to a series of drawings on poplar boards made from the second half of the 1980s, drawing inspiration from the enigmatic figure of Leonardo 's Mona Lisa. These are the years in which, in the artistic career of De Dominicis , the passage from the first conceptual and performative season to the more mature one of painting and installation is consummated. Connecting both periods is the rejection of a thought based on the phenomenology of embodied experience, in favor of a cosmic vision of immortality that transcends the common sense of time-space, something that the artist also recognized in the Mona Lisa painting itself. . The series of poplar panels presents austere female figures in which each individual trait is dissolved into pure archetype: the artist conceives faces of distant beauty and weary elegance, whose elusive features are full of inner resonances. In the series the references to the history of art appear evident, albeit absolutely personal: from the gigantism of Picasso's drawing to Leonardo's nuanced technique.
In the work on display, the mysterious face of Mona Lisa, caught in three quarters, with lowered eyelids and the hint of a smile, is inscribed in a monumental hair. The chiaroscuro, obtained with a dense pencil and charcoal hatching, thickens at the chin, while remaining just hinted at in the other areas of the table, where even the grain of the wood seems to play an expressive role.
The works of d'Oggiono and De Dominicis have been respectively studied by Jacopo Tanzi and Fabio Belloni , whose historical-critical files will be presented in the general catalog of the Cerruti Collection soon to be published for the types of Umberto Allemandi publisher.