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| Girolamo Savoldo Elijah in the Desert ca. 1510 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Girolamo Savoldo St Anthony and St Paul as Hermits ca. 1515 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
"Girolamo Savoldo, born between 1480 and 1485 in Brescia, was more resistant to the pressures of Venetian modernism. He was already a mature artist when he took up permanent residence in Venice, probably not long before 1520, the possessor of a highly accomplished but non-Venetian style. We presume his first artistic education to have been in Brescia, Milan-oriented, and even more immersed than Bergamo in the Lombard preoccupation with literal reality. Our first documented knowledge of Savoldo is, however, not in North Italy but in Florence, where in 1508 he matriculated in the painters' guild. The degree to which his style was formed there, rather than in North Italy, is doubtful. His earliest surviving work (Elijah in the Desert, Washington, National Gallery, Kress Collection) seems not to predate 1510 or 1512, and internal evidence indicates that it is based more on North Italian than on Florentine contacts. A painting similar in theme but apparently of later date, St Anthony and St Paul as Hermits (Venice, Accademia, ca. 1515), is more visibly related to the contemporary North Italian style, or, still more specifically, to modes dispersed from Venice into the provinces, like Cima's."
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| Girolamo Savoldo Shepherd with a Flute ca. 1525 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Adoration of the Child with Donors 1527 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
"As he worked in Venice in the twenties, Savoldo modified his manner. Like Cariani, he responded on occasion to the themes and temper of Giorgionismo (e.g. Shepherd with a Flute, Florence, Contini Collection, ca. 1525 [now Getty Museum, Los Angeles]); Giorgione's reticence of mood and form would have been sympathetic to his own. The examples of Titian and Palma inclined Savoldo towards more flexible delineations of form and deepening of chiaroscuro. It was Lotto, however, who after his return to Venice especially attracted Savoldo: Lotto, standing himself between Lombardy and Venice, seems to have served as a bridge into the contemporary Venetian style, towards which Savoldo moved in the latter years of the third decade, for a while almost converging with it. In 1527, the dated Adoration of the Child with Donors (Hampton Court) is recognizably a Venetian painting in the main, in which Savoldo's still-persistent alien accent emerges as an appearance of conservatism."
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| Girolamo Savoldo Portrait of a Flautist ca. 1527 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Portrait of a Lady as St Margaret ca. 1530 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Portrait of a Man in Armour (called Gaston de Foix) ca. 1530 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Madonna in Glory with St Peter, St Dominic, St Paul and St Jerome ca. 1525-30 oil on panel Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
"Three portraits of this time employ a format Savoldo had observed in Lotto, a horizontal half-length, and learned from him in compositional device and sophistication of colour handling as well. The earliest of these, the Flautist (Florence, Contini Collection, ca. 1527 [now in Brescia]) is subdued in tonality as well as temper, combining Lotto with Giorgione; the later two, a Lady as St Margaret (Rome, Capitoline) and the wrongly-titled Gaston de Foix (Paris, Louvre), both of ca. 1530, are freer, taking example not only from the art of Lotto but also from the energy of form and colour of the recent Titian. They prove to be, in hindsight, the most assimilated to Venetian style and the most metropolitan in their temper of any of Savoldo's works; and as such they are a forcing of his disposition. Probably contemporary with them, a very large-scale altar of the Madonna in Glory with Four Saints (Milan, Brera, towards 1530) is most conservative; heavy in form almost to inertness, sombrely powerful in colour, and insisting on veristic presence."
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| Girolamo Savoldo Tobias and the Angel ca. 1530-35 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Transfiguration ca. 1535 oil on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Pietà ca. 1535 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Pietà engraving by Jan van Troyen, ca. 1658, after the Berlin version of the painting, destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945 Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
"Savoldo's religious paintings of the thirties are still more evidently marked by reassertion of his native tendencies. He incorporated a new activity of light and colour learned from Titianesque style into his own, but he rejected almost altogether the activity that in Titian's style is infused into the pictured actors. In Savoldo's Tobias and the Angel (Rome, Borghese, early 1530s) and in the Transfiguration (Florence, Uffizi, towards 1535) he creates powerful effects of life, but wholly in terms of illumined paint: his means are an exaggeratedly abundant drapery, strong in colour and brightly lit, disposed around plastically large but inert forms. Neither the design of forms – not even of the foldings of the drapery – nor the ordering of colour evinces the working of a synthesizing mind. Beneath the new complexity the essential experience is what it had been long before: of dense substances in additive relation and of colour of compelling force, perceived primarily in local fields. In the Pietà (formerly Berlin, ca. 1535; destroyed 1945), Savoldo multiplies the pretexts that permit an illusionistic display of colour and accompanies it with an almost Flemish labouring of descriptive detail. More high craft than art, perhaps a picture of this kind was motivated by a wish to make the kind of communication that a popular and provincial audience would best understand."
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| Girolamo Savoldo St Matthew ca. 1534 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Mary Magdalene ca. 1535 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Girolamo Savoldo Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1537 oil on canvas Galleria Sabauda (Museo Civico), Turin |
"The effect in Savoldo's paintings of the early thirties of dominant, indeed almost exclusive, concern with painterly display recedes somewhat in the latter half of the decade – the end of his career; we know of no works that certainly post-date 1540. In the later pictures the splendour of paint becomes part of a more generally expressive context. The actors take on warmth and grander stature, and setting evokes mood; the temper of expression is still reticent, but it is gentle and profound, and on occasion it recalls the lyric accent of Giorgione. The nocturnal image of St Matthew (New York, Metropolitan Museum, ca. 1535) is remarkable not only for the virtuosity of light which it displays but also for the way in which the light is the vehicle of an emotion. As the picture is conceived thus simultaneously as a visual experience and as an experience of human feeling, it finds a new degree of unity, and its actors an effect of grandeur and more vital being. The same enhanced dimension is in Savoldo's best-known and most seemingly virtuoso theme, the Magdalene by night light, whose shining moonlit mantle is much more than a luministic tour de force: it reflects, as from a counter-moon, not only an effect of lunar light but a quality of emotion which we associate with it. The most feeling of the late works is an Adoration of the Shepherds (Turin, Museo Civico, ca. 1537) in which the figures move with slow, almost arrested cadence in a crepuscular landscape, shining in it. . . . Inconceivable outside Venice, the Adoration still does not belong entirely to it; and despite its high refinement, its modernity is in essence an updating of an attitude towards art that belongs to the past."
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| Girolamo Savoldo The Nativity ca. 1535-36 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia |
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| Girolamo Savoldo The Nativity ca. 1540 oil on canvas Chiesa di San Giobbe, Venice |
"The last work which we can place in Savoldo's career is a replica (done almost certainly in 1540 for S. Giobbe in Venice; in situ) of a Nativity of which the earlier version had been painted for Brescia four or five years earlier. Even the replica, however, shows the profounder feeling and control of means that characterize Savoldo's latest style. His practice as a painter must virtually have ceased not much after this. We last hear of him in Venice 'troppo maturo dei suoi anni in la vita' at the end of 1548."
– S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)