Bartolomeo Bettera

The son of Francesco Bettera and Lucia Morone, Bartolomeo was christened on 28 August 1639 in the parish of Sant’Alessandro in Colonna, in Borgo San Leonardo in Bergamo, the same neighbourhood in which Evaristo Baschenis (1617-1677), the inventor of the musical still-life genre, was born and lived. On 4 February 1663 Bartolomeo wed Caterina Crappi who was to provide him with many sons, including Bonaventura, his assistant and the future heir of his workshop. A skilled interpreter of Baschenis’s “musical” creations, Bettera made a considerable contribution to their success at both the national and international levels, giving them a fresh boost and renewing them with considerable scenographical verve in line with the Baroque taste of the later 17th century. His substantial and highly original take on the genre, which continued to enjoy popularity well into the 18th century, can be seen as a response to the ongoing and extremely lively demand from a market suddenly deprived of the work of Baschenis, the brilliant painter-priest (also known by the nickname of “Prevarisco”) who died in 1677 at the age of only 59.

The early history of Bettera’s artistic training is still difficult to decipher today, although we may assume that he trained in Bergamo, and very possibly in the workshop of Baschenis, the only one in the city that could offer him first-hand experience of the secrets involved in a “product” that was still an absolute novelty at the time. This hypothesis – which I had earlier rejected due to the objective lack of confirmation in any archive document, including Baschenis’s own two hand-written wills (1660 and 1677) in which he lists all his workshop assistants, friends and relatives – can be tentatively subscribed to if we surmise both that the young apprentice frequented the master’s workshop after 1660, and that in the years thereafter – possibly for copyright reasons – the two men embarked on an intense rivalry that led them to break off all ties. In documentary terms, the only link between Baschenis and Bettera can be found in the notary’s deeds relating to the sale of the late Evaristo Baschenis’s goods and chattels at auction in the public square in Bergamo. On 12 April 1677, the then debt-ridden 36-year-old Bettera purchased for a song not Baschenis’s costly paintings but his “paints, brushes and a stool” along with 14 canvases complete with stretcher frames. The archives also reveal that, between 9 March 1672 when his wife Caterina Crappi’s dowry was recorded and 18 May 1673 when his daughter Antonia was christened, Bartolomeo no longer lived in Bergamo, possibly on account of the huge debts that he had contracted with Bergamo aristocrat Vittorio Lupi (1627-1686).

It has been suggested that, in the course of those months, he travelled to Rome for the first time to explore the “international” taste then fashionable in the papal capital, interacting closely with such still-life specialists as Francesco Noletti known as Il Maltese, the mysterious Benedetto Fioravanti, Carlo Manieri and Antonio Tibaldi, as well as with foreign painters Jacques Hupin and Mainfrain Lecomte. This trip (which is likely to have been the first of several) would justify the transition from paintings closely reflecting Baschenis’s style and which can be attributed to his early years, such as the two signed canvases formerly in the Secco Suardo collection and now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, to the later, monumental composition signed «Bartolomeo Bettera/F. In Roma» now in a private collection, a picture rich in sophisticated optical and spatial effects and in the kind of illusionistic artifice typical of the figurative culture of northern Europe. From the mid-1680s and throughout the following decade (in fact possibly right up until his death), Bettera is recorded as living in Milan, a fact borne out by a painting in the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco signed “Bartolomeo Bettera fece in Milano” and by an archive document dated 1699 – the last document mentioning him – in which the painter, “residing in the city of Milan”, signed the betrothal contract between his son Bonaventura and his future daughter-in-law Olivia Mazzolini.

Bartolomeo’s unmistakable style rests on the arrangement of sumptuous, lively compositions with a “landscape” feel that juxtapose a musical core (violins, violas, trumpets, guitars, lutes, theorboes and so on) with elements of aristocratic cultural taste such as books of poetry, philosophy, literature and history, academic sculptures, coin cabinets in inlaid ebony and ivory, scientific instruments (astrolabes, armillary spheres), terrestrial and celestial globes and other curios worthy of a Wunderkammer. Exemplary in this sense is a youthful canvas formerly in the Remuzzi collection, lit by a sharp, crystalline light that shows off to perfection the polished wood of the musical instruments, the brocade curtains, the exotic carpets and the two crystal globes that emulate an invention of Dutch painter Pieter Claesz now in the National Museum in Nuremberg by including a self-portrait of the painter at his easel. Bettera’s crowded compositions convey a feeling of “organised chaos” and of abundance deliberately displayed, reflecting a formal model proper to the Late Baroque still-life fashionable in Rome at the turn of the 17th century. In that sense, he marks his distance quite radically from the austere, metaphysical compositions of Baschenis, from whom he differs not only in terms of his dissimilar artistic temperament and a more diverse cultural background inclined to imbue the genre with a more spectacular feel, but also in terms of his different interpretation of the Vanitas theme. Against Baschenis’s symbolism of dust and empty spaces filled with religious silence, Bettera pits a bombastic horror vacui conveyed not only in the proliferation of “stage actors” but also in a repertoire of indicators typical of the northern European still-life tradition (totally absent in Baschenis’s work) such as hourglasses, mirrors, candles, skulls and jewels, as well as instruments bundled together in disorderly piles, often without their strings and “unfit” for playing music.

Confused in the crowd of Baschenis’s extremely numerous imitators, Bartolomeo Bettera’s artistic personality only started to acquire a more specific, individual outline in 1996 thanks to the major exhibition entitled Evaristo Baschenis and Still-life in Europe held in Bergamo to mark the 200th anniversary of the Accademia Carrara. On that occasion, close comparison between Baschenis’s paintings and those of his numerous followers enabled scholars also to reorganise Bartolomeo’s catalogue which had been overabundant and confused until then, even including the work of a very modest painter known as the “B.B. Master” with whom Bettera had nothing in common save his initials, as well as the far more elementary work of his son Bonaventura. A further opportunity for getting his artistic profile into clearer focus was provided by a monographic exhibition held in Bergamo in 2008 entitled Bartolomeo Bettera. “The Baroque sonata” curated by Alberto Cottino, which was useful for the important documentary evidence it revealed and for the information it provided regarding his time in Rome and in Milan.