Giovanni Agostino da Lodi. An itinerant painter between Leonardo and Giorgione

For the first time, an exhibition traces the career of one of the most original artists working in Italy during the decades spanning the 1500s.

The exhibition captures the complexity of this artist through 46 works by him and by artists such as Bramantino, Alvise Vivarini, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Dürer, housed at Brera and on loan from museums including the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the National Gallery in London.

Curated by Maria Cristina Passoni, Cristina Quattrini

Scientific Committee: Alessandro Ballarin, Francesco Frangi, Mauro Natale, Maria Cristina Passoni, Cristina Quattrini, Edoardo Rossetti

46 works brought together for the first time reconstruct his career and the context in which it developed. Alongside his paintings, masterworks by Bramantino, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Dürer, Lorenzo Lotto and Girolamo Romanino, the masters with whom Giovanni Agostino engaged, reinterpreting them in an entirely personal way.

Giovanni Agostino da Lodi. Born in Lodi, he trained in Milan in the circle of Bramante and Bramantino before moving to Venice at the end of the fifteenth century, where he worked for over a decade absorbing the language of the city’s great masters. He returned to Milan around 1510, where he worked on major commissions including Santa Maria della Pace and the Certosa di Pavia.
His is a story of belated recognition. For centuries his works were attributed to other painters. It was only in the early twentieth century that the art historian Wilhelm von Bode began grouping together, under the provisional name “Pseudo Boccaccino”, a set of paintings with an unmistakable style. The painter’s true identity emerged thanks to a signature on a small panel held at Brera, published in 1912, though his full critical rehabilitation only came at the end of the last century.

What makes Giovanni Agostino da Lodi unique is his ability to move between two distinct pictorial culturesm Milanese and Venetianm without fully belonging to either. In Venice he absorbed the influence of Alvise Vivarini, then Giorgione. The echo of Leonardo, evident even in his rare drawings, betrays his returns to his home city. And among all the painters of his time, he was one of those most deeply marked by Dürer’s second Venetian sojourn, between 1505 and 1507.