 |
| Cesare da Sesto Christ of the Passion adored by Cardinal Oliviero Carafa ca. 1511 oil on panel Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Salome with the Head of John the Baptist ca. 1512-14 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
"In the context of response to Leonardo of the kind we have described so far, Cesare da Sesto is projected to significant stature. He was no major talent but he possessed, to a degree uncharacteristically Milanese, a sensibility and intelligence that permitted him to penetrate beneath the skin of Leonardo's style. Furthermore, alone among these Leonardeschi, Cesare's exposure to the modern world of art extended far outside Milan. We have no information about his teachers, and no work that predates the second decade, but it seems almost certain that we can identify him first in Rome in the neighbourhood of 1505, as a collaborator of Baldassare Peruzzi. He seems to have remained in Central Italy at least until 1510, and his Roman associations must have included, beyond Peruzzi, the Lombard-Sienese Sodoma, still discernibly Leonardesque; he must also have known the early Roman works of Raphael. It is virtually certain that Cesare saw Florentine painting of the first decade, too, as well as the earlier leavings there of Leonardo. On his return to Milan he was able to effect a form of fusion of the more recent, and especially Raphaelesque, developments of Central Italian style and the dominating model in Milan of Leonardo. In his full length Salome [directly above], Cesare's tenor of expression, his specific types, and his theme are based on Leonardo, and, equally important, most of his manner of working up the picture surface. But the canon of the human form and its articulation are derived from Raphael, as Cesare could have seen them in the early stages of the Segnatura. In the figures of the Baptism [directly below] of the same period, Cesare's alteration of Leonardesque types toward a smoother, slightly vapid grace is in recollection of the Raphaelesque style. . . . However, Cesare's intention and his effects were not always so classical as those of his identifiable sources. His sensibility exposed him to the fascinations and the risks that paraphrase of Leonardo's subtleties involved, and the states of mind that he depicts – and his forms, on occasion, too – may be of a slippery obliqueness, with accents of expression or description that may turn Leonardo's precedents toward caricature."
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Baptism of Christ ca. 1512-14 oil on panel Collezione Gallarati-Scotti, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Adoration of the Kings ca. 1516-19 oil on panel Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
"Cesare's stay in Milan was brief. In 1514, accompanied by an assistant, Aliprando, he departed from Milan (as Leonardo had the year before) and travelled southward, almost certainly again through Rome (and probably through Florence and Siena also), to settle for a period of about six years in Naples and Messina. His most important picture of this southern stay, an Adoration of the Kings [directly above], perpetuates the synthesis he conceived earlier, but in far more complex and sophisticated terms. The old Leonardesque repertory is given subtler exposition, and it is accompanied now by the results of study of the very recent Raphael. There is also an indication, but not proof, in the Adoration of Cesare's recent renewed contact with the Romanized Sienese Peruzzi and Sodoma. A consequence of this most developed kind of interaction between a Leonardesque past and contemporary Raphaelism is a style that resembles the current Sodoma in principle and considerably in aspect. It is as sufficient an approximation of contemporary classicism as Sodoma's: more consistent but less forceful, tending to a refinement more extreme than his and towards more mannered grace."
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist and St George ca. 1513-15 oil on panel Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Palace of the Legion of Honor) |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna and Child with a Lamb ca. 1520 oil on panel Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Penitent St Jerome ca. 1520 oil on panel Southampton City Art Gallery (Hampshire) |
 |
| attributed to Cesare da Sesto Penitent St Jerome before 1523 oil on panel Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) 1523 oil on panels Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
"Returning to Milan about 1520, Cesare left one more major work there in the year he died, a polyptych of the Madonna in Glory with attendant single figures of saints [complete view, above, and details below] for the church of S. Rocco. Another trip through Rome for Cesare, increasingly assiduous in his regard for Raphael, finally weighed him down with the baggage of motifs which, in this last work – inhibited in part by its archaic Lombard form – he could no longer synthetically recombine. But in the course of his career he had achieved a historical function of modest consequence by his eclecticism, as the agent of transmission of elements of Raphaelism to the north, and of Leonardism to the south of Italy."
– S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - Madonna in Glory 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - St John the Baptist 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - St John the Evangelist 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - St Sebastian 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - St Roch 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |
 |
| Cesare da Sesto Madonna in Glory (Polyptych of San Rocco) detail - St Christopher 1523 oil on panel Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan |