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| Bramantino Nativity ca. 1490-92 oil on panel Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan |
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| Bramantino Ecce Homo ca. 1495 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Bramantino Adoration of the Magi ca. 1500 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
"Bartolomeo Suardi, Il Bramantino, born in Milan c. 1465, was of an age to have a formed style by the time Leonardo's work became a meaningful example. Substantially educated by the older Bramante, from whom he took his name, Bramantino belonged on this account in the line of descent from Piero della Francesca, carried by Bramante from Urbino; this represented a tradition – the structured but immobile realism of the Quattrocento – that was fundamentally distinct from Leonardo's thought. In Milan, in Bramante's hands, this tradition had been altered by a new infusion of expressive force and by a sharper focus in description. Acquiring these new elements of style from his master, Bramantino employed them yet more energetically in his earliest works. In the Nativity (Milan, Ambrosiana) of the early 1490s he does not just incisively describe but manipulates appearances into excitant silhouetted patterns. In his Ecce Homo (Thyssen Collection), adapted frankly from a model of Bramante's, Bramantino finds, with more authentically Milanese tendency, a more trenchant verism – not self-sufficient, but the means by which he could transmit an intense expressiveness. The Bramantesque rigour of structure in the Ecce Homo is more pronounced than in the earlier Nativity, and in the Adoration of the Magi (London, National Gallery) it has become the picture's dominating effect, seeking architectonic and geometric logic of a purity beyond Bramante's. Still sharp in its rendering of form, and more acute in its sensibility to light, the Adoration seems not only a development on Bramante's style but a re-creation of its sources in Piero."
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| Bramantino Madonna and Child ca. 1485-90 tempera and oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Bramantino Noli me tangere ca. 1490-95 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
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| Bramantino Gathering of Manna ca. 1505-1506 oil on panel Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago |
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| Bramantino Raising of Lazarus ca. 1505-1506 oil on panel Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago |
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| Bramantino Madonna and Child 1508 oil on panel Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"The impulse, Leonardesque in origin, that briefly summoned Bramantino's forms to near-mobility recedes beneath a will to make geometry as rigorous and pure as in an architecture, and as abstracting as the requirements of representation will permit. As if to symbolize his point and make it still more clear, Bramantino's backgrounds, looming silhouettes of an imagined and unpeopled architecture, constructed with a rule and square, take increasing prominence in his designs. Against such settings the effect of a consonant geometry in the figures is doubled: they seem as generalized in feeling as in form, quiet in an ideal symmetry of total stillness. The extreme ideality – more properly, near-abstractness – of description and design exaggerates the principles of Cinquecento classicism, denaturing them in a double sense."
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| Bramantino Madonna and Child with Two Angels ca. 1508 detached fresco Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Bramantino Madonna and Child with Male Figure ca. 1515-20 oil on panel Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Bramantino Madonna of the Towers ca. 1520 oil on panel Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan |
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| Bramantino Crucifixion ca. 1520 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
"The evocation of a still and removed world is in Bramantino's ordering even of the tragic drama of the Crucifixion (Milan, Brera), impressive in the grandeur of its forms, but a little vacant. It is the vacancy that displaces the grandeur in the succeeding years, but because Bramantino never quite wholly moved in the domain of Cinquecento classicism, it is not exact – though it is suggestive – to speak of his work of the third decade as exhibiting the traits of a vacant classical style. Nevertheless, what until then had been a beautifully deliberate geometry turns gradually in the pictures of his last decade (he died in 1530) into deadened pattern, made as if by routine, and his figures acquire the look of mournful, structureless automata. There is a private pathos in these later works, but it is so inward, and so weak that it barely reaches to the viewer. This kind of abstraction from a classicizing style was not dictated, like that of contemporary Mannerism, by creative principle but by a negation of it that could have no future consequences."
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| Bramantino Lamentation ca. 1520-25 oil on canvas Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
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| Bramantino Flight into Egypt ca. 1520-30 oil on panel Santuario della Madonna del Sasso, Orselina, Switzerland |
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| follower of Bramantino Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1535 oil on panel Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
– quoted passages from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 by S.J. Freedberg, Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)