Gherardo delle Notti and the bizzarre paintings

FLORENCE, ITALY – The Galleria degli Uffizi opens the Florence 2015. Art for a Year exhibition season with the first monographic exhibition ever devoted to Gerrit van Honthorst, a Caravaggesque painter from Holland better known to the Italian public by the nickname of Gherardo delle Notti on account of his propensity for painting nocturnal scenes whose atmospheric rendering of light was generated by the intense glow of candles and the contrasting shadows they cast.

When Gerrit van Honthorst hastily departed from Rome in the late spring of 1620 to return to his native Utrecht for ever, he must have been living in Italy for almost ten years.  He probably first came to Italy at the beginning of the second decade of the 17th century.

The painter’s time in Italy proved to be the finest and stylistically most innovative period of his entire career.  He subscribed almost immediately to Caravaggio’s revolution, and his earliest work reveals all the raw strength of a young northern artist dazzled by Caravaggio’s naturalism.

The exhibition provides a convincing and detailed account both of his early, simpler northern phase (with such works as the Dead Christ with Two Angels from Palazzo Reale in Genoa, or the newly attributed Judith at Prayer Before Beheading Holofernes from a private collection) and of his better-known mature period.  This second phase in his career includes the wonderful pictures that made his name as a painter, ranging from the convivial paintings in Florence (the Supper Party, Fortune and Supper with the Lute Player) to those that belonged to Vincenzo Giustiniani (with the exceptional loan of Christ before the High Priest Caiaphas from the National Gallery in London).

The exhibition, curated by Gianni Papi, who also edited the catalogue published by Giunti, is promoted by the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo with the Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici della Toscana, the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze,  the Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze Musei and the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.