Francesco Frangi and Mauro Natale's lecture anticipates the exhibition Pavia 1525: The Arts in the Renaissance and the Tapestries of the Battle scheduled at the Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo in Pavia, of which they are co-curators.
The exhibition recounts, through outstanding artistic evidence, the artistic culture of one of the Renaissance capitals of northern Italy in the decades leading up to the famous battle that took place in the city on February 24, 1525. This was a crucial clash in European history, as the imperial forces of Charles V, defeating the French army of Francis I, ended French ambitions in Italy, consolidating Spanish power over the Italian Peninsula and marking the beginning of an era of Habsburg dominance in Europe.
The lecture aims to show the public the splendid artistic and cultural flowering that the city of Pavia experienced during the Renaissance, which had as its epicenter the site of the Certosa Pavese, in which numerous sculptors from the Ceresio Basin were also active. It was a varied culture, with exchanges with the nerve centers of Italian artistic culture, particularly Milan and Genoa, but also Florence, and which also had reflections on the artistic production of the Comasca diocese (to which today's Canton Ticino also belonged). A tale that closes with the depiction of the battle, conceived and realized very few years later, in the spectacular tapestries of the Capodimonte Museum, exceptionally lent for the Cinquecentenario, woven in the years 1530-1532 by the Flemish manufactory of Jan and Willem Dermoyen from designs by Bernard von Orley.
