Impressive Italian artworks at south Warwickshire gallery

Compton Verney’s curators have made an uncharacteristic leap backwards, 500 years in fact, to produce an exhibition of Italian Renaissance paintings from the Glasgow Museums collection that’s not one of their most adventurous shows but for masterpieces per square yard is arguably one of their best.

It’s the quality that impresses. You know that you are in for a treat when you catch sight of Botticelli’s Annunciation in the first room which at a mere 20 x 30 inches punches well above its weight. It must have seemed like a daring departure when it was finished in 1495 because it still looks daring today.

It shares the room with, amongst other things, The Master of Glasgow Adoration which, though painted ten years later seems positively and gloriously medieval in its newly cleaned and gilded state. There’s an impressive Titian next door that’s only attributed but if it wasn’t painted by the master himself, it must have been the work of some unacknowledged and unlikely genius of an assistant.

There are two magnificently imposing landscapes in the main gallery by the Neapolitan artist, Salvator Rosa that on closer inspection turn out to be scenes from the life of Christ. It seems to herald a change of emphasis because pink flesh and picturesque views for the Grand Tourists dominate thereafter. These large fleshy confections don’t have the appeal of the work in the previous galleries though for sheer honesty and compositional ingenuity, Francesco Gaurdi’s View of San Giorgio Maggiore stands out. The survey extends to the Victorian era where quasi pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for a medieval past and moody introspection brings this large and largely impressive show to a more soberly earthbound conclusion.

Peter McCarthy