September 2008

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According to his 18th-century biographer, Girolamo Barrufaldi, Garofalo was proclaimed by all the best ‘professors and dilettanti to be the Raphael of the Ferrarese’. This accolade has proved to be a mixed blessing for the painter’s reputation, since his figure style unquestionably looks awkward and rigid compared with the masterly fluency of Raphael himself. The comparison somehow also implies that once Garofalo had been exposed to the work of Raphael, presumably on a visit to Rome in about 1512-13, he adopted an academic classicism that he continued to pursue, virtually unchanged, until finally, according to Vasari, he lost his eyesight in about 1550. Nor has Garofalo seemed to share any of the wit or poetic imagination of his slightly younger Ferrarese contemporary Dosso. Yet, as this exhibition shows, Garofalo is a much more varied and inventive artist than he has usually been given credit for, and at his best his paintings are characterised by richly glowing colours, highly evocative and fantastic landscape backgrounds, and an extraordinary refinement of detail.

The occasion for the exhibition is the inauguration of the Castello Estense at the centre of Ferrara as the Italian outstation of the Hermitage Museum. Apart from the fact that the artist has never previously been the subject of a monographic exhibition, the choice of Garofalo is symbolically highly appropriate, since his Deposition became the very first Italian Old Master painting to arrive in Russia when it was presented to Peter the Great by his agent in Venice in 1720. Among other pictures by Garofalo lent to Ferrara by the Hermitage are three enormous canvases painted for the former convent of S. Bernardino, including a Wedding Feast at Cana, signed and dated 1531, once in the nuns’ refectory (Fig. 2), and a Feeding of the Five Thousand that has been on deposit since 1931 in Khabarovsk, in the far east of Russia close to the Chinese border.

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