Posterity has not been uniformly kind to the artists from the Bolognese School of the Italian Baroque. Their stock tumbled in the succeeding centuries, particularly when the eccentric Victorian critic and arbiter of taste John Ruskin decided to put the boot in. The Bolognese painters, including the celebrated Carracci, possessed "No single virtue, no colour, no drawing, no character, no history," and, he added for good measure, "no thought." And that was pretty much that.
Until, gradually, in the 20th century, the slow rehabilitation of the Bolognese began. This is due in no small measure to the collector and scholar Sir Denis Mahon who, from the 1930s, began to buy work by these relatively neglected artists and preach their virtues. As it happens, Sergio Benedetti, head curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, is also an exponent of the Italian Baroque. It was Sir Denis he turned to when he was trying to authenticate the "lost" Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, and it was Sir Denis who donated eight 17th-century paintings to the gallery, including significant works by Guercino, Guido Reni and Giordano, all of which leaves the gallery with, Benedetti reckons, "one of the most important collections of Baroque art outside of Italy".
It makes sense then, that the gallery plays host to a selection of 30 or so 16th and 18th-, but mainly 17th-century paintings, from the Bolognese and Venetian schools, under the title A Taste for the Baroque. The paintings are drawn from the Rolo Banca 1473 Collection (and they come to Ireland with help from EuroPlus, the Dublin-based asset management arm of UniCredito). The collection, which runs to about 150 works in all, is usually housed in the magnificent Palazzo Magnani in Bologna, a senatorial palace which incorporates a series of frescoes illustrating episodes from the story of Romulus and Remus, painted by the celebrated Carracci, Annibale, Agostino and their cousin, Ludovico. These frescoes, and their magnificent setting, are displayed in a series of large-scale photographs as part of the exhibition.
Caravaggio's dark, coarse, gritty theatricality represented one route out of the impasse of Italian Mannerist art, which at its worst recycled Renaissance models in a kind of debased, decorative froth. The Carracci - whose studio in Bologna became a renowned academy, responsible for training a whole generation of Bolognese painters - offered another, less extreme, way forward, one well illustrated in the Palazzo Magnani frescoes. They returned to Renaissance ideals, though Ruskin would later grumble, in a dilute, academicised form.
Where Caravaggio is thought to have painted directly onto the canvas with the minimum of preparatory work, drawing underpinned the Carracci pictorial method. A picture was built up through studies from nature and careful compositional planning. And a wide spectrum of influence, from Raphael to the Venetians, ensured a rather lighter, airier, more varied feeling to their work than that of Caravaggio. Still, the influence of Caravaggio certainly filters through in several of the Rolo Banca pictures. In fact, as Benedetti points out, in certain respects Lorenzo Sabatini's Judith with the Head of Holofernes anticipates Caravaggio with its hard, confrontational style. Among the highlights in the show are a religious composition by Ludovico Carracci and a Caravaggiesque study of St Jerome by one of the Carracci's pupils, Ciacomo Cavedone. There are four works by another pupil whose nickname, Guercino, translates as "squint-eyed", including a rather luridly painted Agony in the Garden and a beautiful Lucretia which is now known to be but a fragment of a larger composition.
These Baroque artists could be a jealous bunch. Guercino was greatly resented by Guido Reni, who loathed him and regarded him as an imitator, and the notoriously quick-tempered Caravaggio, reputedly, had once threatened Reni on the same grounds. One of the best pictures, Reni's austere Christ Crowned with Thorns, actually belongs to the Pinoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Benedetti justifies its inclusion on the basis that it was purchased for the Pinoteca this year by the Rolo Banca, with a significant contribution from Sir Denis. Reni, an inveterate gambler, remained celibate throughout his life and his artistic reputation was to suffer, appropriately enough, because of his association with the glut of saccharine Virgins turned out by his factory-like studio. But his study of Christ is superb.
Simone Cantarini was, he says, "Bolognese by adoption". Now recognised as one of the foremost Bolognese Baroque painters, "he was a terrific draughtsman and left numerous works on paper". In his dark but extremely lively and ambitious The Adoration of the Kings, Benedetti points to the rendering of a young boy on the left of the painting, whose eyes look directly into ours, as a remarkable piece of portraiture.
Giuseppi Maria Crespi, "the greatest genre painter in 18th-century Bologna," according to Benedetti, is represented by several fairly dark pieces. His attention to the everyday reality of working people's lives earned him, and his fellow genre artists, a firm rebuke from the aesthete Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who described them, in relation to their great forebears, as "pygmies pissing on the feet of a giant".
Of the Venetian painters, Benedetti chose one, Antonio Carneo, who is highly regarded in Italy but little known elsewhere. Carneo is a fine, fluent painter, relaxed but quietly observant, with a feeling for flowing, involving compositions.
The best painting, Benedetti suggests, is chronologically the earliest, the excellent Venus Awakening by Dosso Dossi, "one of the major protagonists of the Italian Renaissance," in the poet Ludovico Ariosto's estimation, with which Benedetti concurs. Dossi, the last of the Ferrarese painters,was a gifted artist with a distinctive vision, who created extraordinary, magical landscapes inhabited by fabulously garbed protagonists. Though here, with his nude Venus, he shows he is capable of painting flesh as well as the Venetians, particularly Titian, who were clearly an influence. This painting, with its magnificent Spanish frame, is probably the star of the show - but then, let's not make Ruskin's mistake of discounting the Bolognese entirely.
A Taste for the Baroque is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin until September 30th. An accompanying illustrated catalogue, by Sergio Benedetti, is £9.95