Saturday, October 12, 2019

Boccaccio and Camillo Boccaccino - Cremona

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1500-1507
oil on panel
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1501
oil on panel
Galleria Estense, Modena

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Madonna and Child
ca. 1504-1505
oil and tempera on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Madonna and Child
ca. 1506
oil on panel
Metropolitan  Museum of Art, New York

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Gypsy Girl
ca. 1504-1505
oil on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

"The caposcuola who dominated the first decade of Cinquecento painting in Cremona was himself an excellent example of the making of a style by intersection of influences, but upon a personality of much consistency and strength.  Boccaccio Boccaccino (1467-1525) was the son of a Cremonese resident in Ferrara.  His early schooling was entirely Ferrarese, and his activity almost wholly so until about 1505.  Ercole Roberti's style as well as Lorenzo Costa's had been most important to him; then, shortly after the beginning of the new century, experience of Venice caused a major infusion of Bellinism in his art."

– S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Madonna and Child enthroned
with St John the Baptist and St Catherine of Alexandria
ca. 1504-1505
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Madonna and Child enthroned
with Saints and Donor
ca. 1505-1515
oil on panel
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (West Midlands)

Boccaccio Boccaccino
Madonna and Child
before 1524
oil on panel
Manchester Art Gallery

attributed to Boccaccio Boccaccino
Portrait of a Young Man
before 1524
oil on canvas
private collection

"Camillo Boccaccino (1504-1546), Boccaccio's son, had a differently active role in his relation with the newer style.  Of a different creative stature altogether from his local contemporaries, Camillo was intelligently responsive to the most advance currents of invention that he encountered – not at Cremona, but in Emilia.  He found the examples of Correggio, Pordenone, and Parmigianino, and in time that of Giulio Romano, and creatively transformed them.  Almost from the beginning, there was an inclination in his style towards a temper which resembled that of Mannerism, and no more than a decade from the time of his first independent work he made an identifiably personal, indeed idiosyncratic, contribution to the repertory of that style.  Though first trained by his father, Camillo is reported by old sources, with almost certain truth, to have been in Parma between 1522 and 1524 and connected with Correggio.  . . .  In 1535 he was commissioned to undertake the decoration of the Cremonese abbey church of S. Sigismondo, which in consequence of his efforts and those of his successors in the task was to become one of the prime ensembles of Mannerist style in Northern Italy.  Camillo's work there consisted of the painting of the semi-dome and laterals in the apse.  In the semi-dome, the Eternal in Glory with the Evangelists [directly below] . . .  indicates that Camillo had turned away from Pordenone to renew his old allegiance to Parma – to both Correggio and Parmigianino.  Both Correggio's Parmesan domes and his apsidal scheme at S. Giovanni Evangelista supply the basis of Camillo's design, a cloud-borne illusion at once propelled towards the spectator and ascending into far celestial space, brilliant with silhouetted contrasts of sharp lights and darks.  But the precise vocabulary of form is not Correggio's but deduced from Parmigianino, describing shapes in impelled, arbitrary rhythms that make unexpected transformations of appearances and a temper of excitant grace."

– S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)

Camillo Boccaccino
Eternal in Glory with the Evangelists
1537
fresco
Chiesa di San Sigismondo, Cremona

Camillo Boccaccino
Madonna and Child in Glory
with St Bartholomew, St John the Baptist and St Jerome
1532
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Camillo Boccaccino
God the Father
ca. 1520-40
oil on panel
Museo Civico ala Ponzone, Cremona

Camillo Boccaccino
Holy Family in a Landscape
ca. 1535-40
oil on panel
Glasgow Museums

Camillo Boccaccino
Madonna and Child enthroned
with the Archangel Michael and Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni
ca. 1537-40
oil on canvas
Museo Civico ala Ponzone, Cremona