by Antonio Gesino
For the collecting world as well as for artistic historical research, Italian painting between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is still today an inexhaustible mine of artists who worked in parallel, and sometimes sideways, to the great innovations of the masters of the Renaissance. A movement that beyond contemporary perception represented the elite of a cultural and artistic renewal, which only in the following centuries was understood as fundamental for the construction of a modern role for art and artists as essential witnesses of the history of a country.
However, like a great river born from multiple tributaries, each artist represented the visual culture of his own territory, which together built the tradition and innovation of that galaxy of infinite states, feuds, sacred and profane powers that was Italy at the time.
In the next auction of Antique Paintings on November 27th, four canvases will be exhibited, representing a patchwork of visual languages of a season of art that still excites for its countless peculiarities.
Starting from the artist with the most archaic style, the St. Prosdocimo of Padua, by the Master of the Triptych of St. Nicholas, stands out. The artist was active in Veneto between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The work was painted on a gold background panel and perhaps commissioned in 1503 by the abbess Catarina Mariotti for the church of St. Prosdocimo in Venice. The second canvas that deserves attention is a Madonna and Child in Perugia style by Antonio del Massaro from Viterbo known as “Il Pastura”. The artist was active in Rome between 1478 and 1516, and was one of the main protagonists of painting in the Eternal City at the end of the fifteenth century, together with Melozzo da Forlì and Antoniazzo Romano, with whom he signed the statute of the guild of San Luca. The third work to be noted is a canvas with the Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine and St. Jerome, by the Ferrara mannerist Giuseppe Mazzuoli known as “Il Bastarolo”. The work is considered to have been painted in his youth because of the clear references to Dosso Dossi and the influences of Correggio and Parmigianino.
Finally, by the Veronese Giovan Francesco Caroto, a Madonna with Child and St. Giovannino of clear Leonardesque influence deduced from the Milanese trip in the mid-1500s to the court of Anton Maria Visconti, where he came into contact with Bramantino, Bernardino Luini and Cesare da Sesto.
