The tailor looks back at you with an intimate, familiar cock of the head. He must have been a close friend of Giovanni Battista Moroni. It is easy to picture them both as local characters in their small north Italian city. The tailor and his mate the painter, drinking wine on an evening in downtown Bergamo. Their pal the doctor also hangs nearby, in another of Moroni’s beguilingly frank portraits.
There are almost no other paintings from the Renaissance that can be compared with Moroni’s masterpiece The Tailor (which dates from around 1570) in the way it praises and dignifies manual work. The tailor is busy tailoring. Even as he looks at us with such sensitivity, he is cutting a piece of black cloth for a client. What makes Moroni break with the elitism of his age to praise a worker and his work?
It is easy to see in this revealing and intelligent exhibition why Moroni might empathise with a tailor. He too is a kind of tailor, fashioning the images of local aristocrats with his gorgeously stylish portraits. In the 16th-century Veneto region, this brilliant portraitist – who never worked in Venice itself and so never became famous – created images at once grand, heroic and softly poetic that are incredibly haunting today. Moroni is one of the most subtle portrait artists of all time, and deserves to be much more famous than he is.
Clothes are part of his quiet magic. He loves to paint a lace cuff, a frilled collar. One of his grandest paintings is known simply as Man in Pink because it clothes its unknown sitter in a dazzling array of rose-coloured tunic and tights. Do clothes make the man?
They certainly make the woman, in Moroni’s eyes. It is startling how rarely he gives a woman sitter any real character. His few women – including two poets – are decked out in fabulous gowns, but he does not seem engaged with them.
His men are another matter.
Moroni loves men. He loves their beards, their swords, their finely hosed legs. His portraits of men are erotically charged in a way his pictures of women are not. I’ve always wondered what made Moroni tick. His paintings have such lyrical power. This exhibition makes it obvious – though not I think intentionally – that Moroni paints men with such emotional depth because he is in love with them.
You only have to look at the lavish way he portrays Antonio Navagero’s bulging red codpiece to see this. Like an erotic accessory photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, it protrudes massively out from his fur-lined robe, as impossible to ignore as Mr Punch’s hump. It is shaped like an actual, impressive penis. Navagero is a man of power – a Venetian bureaucrat – and the sunlight catching his tailored phallus expresses that authority. Yet the painting also has the warmth and passion that makes all Moroni’s men so captivating.
I like to picture Moroni and his friend the tailor having a good laugh about that codpiece. Perhaps on the piazza, or maybe in bed. For the intimacy between Moroni and his most enigmatic model is cast in a new light by this fascinating exhibition. The artist looks at the tailor, surely, with love’s eyes.
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