Anno LXIX – Terza serie – Numero 138 (817) Marzo 2018

Marcello Calogero: Alfonso Lombardi a Santa Maria della Vita: per una rilettura stilistica

ANTOLOGIA DI ARTISTI

Intorno a un polittico di Tommaso Garelli: qualche precisazione e una nuova aggiunta (Giacomo A. Calogero)
Per Mirabello Cavalori disegnatore e pittore (Marta Privitera)
A new Giambologna relief after a drawing by Andrea Boscoli (Dimitrios Zikos)
Giuseppe Maria Soli in palazzo Barberini a Roma (Giulia Conte)

RICERCHE D’ARCHIVIO

Ancora il Cigoli a Figline (con una data per Tommaso Gherardini) (Alessandro Grassi)

SUMMARY

MARCELLO CALOGERO
After having spent the first years of his career as a sculptor at the court of Ferrara, Alfonso Lombardi moved to Bologna in about 1519. There, before 1522, Lombardi completed a large-scale terracotta statuary group of the Funeral of the Virgin for the confraternity of Santa Maria della Vita. In his crafting of this work the sculptor succeeded in reinventing the language of sculpture according to the canons of Roman-inspired figurative culture of the first two decades of the sixteenth century, known in Emilia above all through the circulation of drawings and prints. An attentive stylistic study enables us to read the Funeral of the Virgin through the lens of Alfonso Lombardi’s training in Ferrara, appropriately setting the work in the context of Emilian Raphaelism around 1520. A remarkable aspect of these statues is the naturalistic handling of expressions and flesh passages, now more appreciable through a new series of photographs.

GIACOMO A. CALOGERO
The article presents a Conversion of Saint Paul which recently appeared on the art market erroneously ascribed to the circle of Biagio di Antonio, but which should instead be attributed to Tommaso di Alberto Garelli. A secondary figure in Renaissance art of the Valpadana, Garelli nonetheless deserves praise for his early adherence to the new dictates of Donatello and antiquarian culture (precisely as in the painting published here), which had been introduced to Bologna by Marco Zoppo. This small panel must have formed part of the predella of a polyptych painted by the Bolognese artist after the one executed by Zoppo for the church of San Clemente in the Collegio di Spagna. The two masters were both involved on the project to decorate the chapel of Saint Bridget in San Petronio, where a planned cycle of frescoes was assigned to Garelli and Giovanni Francesco da Rimini. An unpublished fragment discovered during recent conservation of the chapel may now be attributed to the latter, and certainly relates to the initial stage of the decoration, which was never completed.

MARTA PRIVITERA
The article presents an addition to the few securely-attributed drawings by Mirabello Cavalori, a Figure study for the Lanificio (Wool factory), painted in about 1570 for the Studiolo of Francesco de’ Medici (Florence, Palazzo Vecchio). The sheet is housed in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi (inv. no. 15656F), currently attributed to Passignano. The handling of the male figure on this sheet suggests contact with the graphic style of Cavalori’s colleague Girolamo Macchietti, but also shows a different way of analysing light at the expense of form. As well as attributing the drawing in the Uffizi, the author also proposes Cavalori’s authorship for the Portrait of a Young Man in the Saint Louis Art Museum, formerly ascribed to Michele Tosini and then to Francesco Salviati.

DIMITRIOS ZIKOS
Il tondo in terracotta della Quentin Foundation di Londra, probabile modello per un rilievo in bronzo, viene messo in rapporto con un disegno di Andrea Boscoli e attribuito a Giambologna sulla base di un serrato confronto stilistico con i rilievi dello scultore e in particolare con quelli del monumento equestre di Cosimo I (1598), di cui sarebbe coevo. Alla luce dell’interesse di Ferdinando I per il Santo Sepolcro e del fatto che sua moglie Cristina di Lorena discende da Goffredo di Buglione, primo re latino di Gerusalemme, il soggetto è letto in relazione alla storia delle Crociate anche sulla base delle incisioni, ritraenti le gesta dei Crociati ed eseguite su disegni del Boscoli, che Raffaele Gualterotti pubblicava nel 1589 a corredo della nota descrizione degli apparati per le nozze tra Ferdinando I e Cristina. La scena corrisponde alla descrizione di un momento della prima Crociata narrato da alcune cronache, come la Historia Hierosolymitana di Alberto di Aquisgrana. Tuttavia, non esistendo ulteriori indizi per una simile commissione, questa proposta rimane ipotetica.

GIULIA CONTE
The inventory of goods owned by Prince Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra, who had married Cornelia Costanza Barberini in 1728, contains a reference to Giuseppe Maria Soli as the author of a canvas in the alcove of the second-floor apartment in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. This makes it possible to reconstruct Soli’s hitherto unpublished activity there, and he is credited with the authorship of the six canvases in the salone of the apartment and the decoration of the gabinetto dei ritratti. Bearing in mind that Soli was in Rome between 1770 and 1784, and that scholarship indicates that work on the palazzo was completed by 1770, a new chronology is put forward – the 1770s – thus also providing a context for the precocious taste in Neoclassicism which has been recognised here, precisely in the decoration of the gabinetto.

ALESSANDRO GRASSI
A study of the documentation relating to the Compagnia del Corpus Domini in Figline Valdarno, housed in the Florence State Archives, makes it possible to usnquestionably establish the authorship of two oil paintings on wood panel of the Sorrowful Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist in mourning, now in the sacristy of the local Collegiate Church of Santa Maria, to the early period of Ludovico Cigoli. These formed the lateral elements of a macchina d’altare dedicated to the Holy Crucifix, dismantled in the eighteenth century during a modernisation project that also involved the painting of a fresco in the vault above by Tommaso Gherardini, in 1774. Cigoli’s two panels, datable to 1586-1587, provide a key element for the understanding of his stylistic evolution, when after his early works, influenced by Pontormo’s maniera, he turned to the more experimental stimuli prompted by his discovery of Correggio and Barocci.