Il Piccio’s portrait of Count Guglielmo Lochis at the age of forty-six, then famous as a politician and an art collector, is Neoclassical in its cold tonality, his head framed against a pearly grey background, his clothes of classic refinement and luxury. In 1835, the year in which he was portrayed, Lochis was the Commissioner in charge of the much criticised sale from the Accademia Carrara collection of more than a thousand seventeenth-century Baroque paintings.[1] This portrait, both for the artist and sitter, represents a triumph of Neoclassical taste at the expense of the Baroque. It instated Il Piccio as the Neoclassical portrait painter in Bergamo.[2]

Politically Lochis was an ally of the Hapsburg Court, an allegiance that was rewarded with important honours, for at that date Northern Italy was under Austro-Hungarian occupation; he was the pro Austrian podestà of Bergamo from 1842 to 1848. His politics were at odds with those of other notable Bergamo collectors, Count Giacomo Carrara and Giovanni Morelli, who were patriots and espoused the cause of Italian unity, the Risorgimento.

Lochis began collecting in the 1820s. A cultivated patrician, he built a Neoclassical villa in the countryside near Bergamo, at Crocette di Mozzo, with an elegant gallery in the form of the Pantheon.[3] He had a taste for the early ‘pure’ fifteenth-century Renaissance—exemplified by many works from his collection in this exhibition. He was a Trustee of the Accademia Carrara from 1822 to 1859, often elected President during that time, and in the 1850s he was made an Honorary Director. His personal collection was visited by collectors and museum directors, such as Sir Charles Eastlake, Director of the National Gallery, London, and his German travelling agent, Otto Mündler, who visited Crocette di Mozzo on several occasions scouting for good paintings for the developing collection in London. On 4 February 1856 Eastlake reported to his Trustees that the Count had offered him his entire collection; but Lochis changed his mind, fearing that the collection would be divided.[4]

At the time of his death in 1859 Lochis owned more than 550 paintings, many from the early Renaissance.[5] In his Will he asked that his collection be displayed intact at his villa, the responsibility of his son Count Carlo Lochis. But the estate was encumbered with debts and, fearful that the best works would be lost for Bergamo, in 1866 the collection was divided: some 240 paintings went to the Accademia Carrara, where they are still held, and 300 remained with Carlo, who in just eight years sold all the works that he inherited.[6] The paintings for the Accademia were selected by a Commission of three, with Morelli the most prominent. The story of the dispersal of the paintings inherited by Carlo Lochis involved many celebrated figures in the international art world who all wanted some of what Lady Eastlake described as ‘one of the richest temples of Cinquecento art’.

Jaynie Anderson

[1] See Giovanni Valagussa, ‘The Accademia Carrara: Collections, collectors and community’, supra, pp. 43, 48.

[2] Francesco Rossi, Il Piccio e artisti bergamaschi del suo tempo, (catalogue of an exhibition at the Palazzo della Ragione), Bergamo: Electa Editrice, 1974.

[3] Giovanna Brambilla Ranise, La raccolta dimezzata. Storia della dispersione della pinacoteca di Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859), Bergamo: Lubrina Editore, 2007.

[4] Jaynie Anderson, ‘Layard and Morelli’, in F. M. Fales and B. J. Hickey (eds), Austen Henry Layard tra l’Oriente e Venezia, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1987, p. 119.

[5] Guglielmo Lochis, La pinacoteca e la villa Lochis alla Crocetta di Mozzo presso Bergamo, Bergamo: Tipografia Natale, 1858; reprinted 1973, Bologna.

[6] Brambilla Ranise, 2007.