Renaissance Images of Legendary Roman Heroine Lucretia - II

Giampietrino
Lucretia
ca. 1520
oil on panel
Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Lucas Cranach the Elder and workshop
Lucretia
1530
oil on panel
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Francesco Vecellio (elder brother of Titian)
Lucretia
ca. 1530
oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Girolamo Romanino
Tarquin and Lucretia
1531-32
fresco
Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento 

from The Rape of Lucrece

'O comfort-killing night, image of hell!
Dim register and notary of shame!
Black stage for tragedies and murders fell!
Vast sin-concealing chaos! nurse of blame!
Blind muffled bawd! dark harbour for defame!
Grim cave of death, whispering conspirator
With close-tongued treason and the ravisher!'

– William Shakespeare (1594)

Lorenzo Lotto
Portrait of a Lady as Lucretia
1533
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Parmigianino
Lucretia
ca. 1539
watercolor
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Aert van Ort
Death of Lucretia
before 1540
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Georg Pencz
Tarquin and Lucretia
ca. 1546-47
engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Georg Pencz
Death of Lucretia
ca. 1546-47
engraving
Art Institute of Chicago

workshop of Carl von Egeri
Lucretia
1561
painted glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Titian
Tarquin and Lucretia
ca. 1571
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jacopo Tintoretto
Tarquin and Lucretia
ca. 1578-80
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Paolo Veronese
Lucretia
ca. 1580-83
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

attributed to Luca Cambiaso
Death of Lucretia
before 1585
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Palma il Giovane
Tarquin and Lucretia
1590s
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Cesare da Sesto (1477-1523) - Milan, Rome, Naples

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

Marco d'Oggiono (ca. 1467-1524) - Milan

Marco d'Oggiono after Leonardo da Vinci
Last Supper
before 1524
oil on canvas
Musée de la Renaissance, Château d'Écouen

Marco d'Oggiono
Portrait of Francesco di Bartolomeo Archinto
1494
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Marco d'Oggiono
Madonna and Child
ca. 1490
tempera on panel
Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand

Marco d'Oggiono and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio
Resurrection of Christ
with St Leonard of Noblac and St Lucy
ca. 1491-94
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

attributed to Marco d'Oggiono
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1495-1500
oil on panel
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

attributed to Marco d'Oggiono
Girl with Cherries
ca. 1491-95
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"From lessons learned in Leonardo da Vinci's studio, Marco d'Oggiono forged an extremely successful artistic career.  Absorbing both the techniques and themes of Italy's preeminent Renaissance painter, d'Oggiono appealed to a broad public desiring fashionable "Leonardesque" work.  The son of a successful goldsmith, d'Oggiono was probably born in Milan between 1465 and 1470.  Little is known of his youth, including whom he may have trained with before encountering Leonardo.  By 1490, d'Oggiono had met and become in some way associated with Leonardo; their exact working relation is undocumented.  Initially, d'Oggiono collaborated on works with several of Leonardo's followers, but by the late 1490s he had an independent career.  He painted church altarpieces as well as more modest works on canvas.  Very few of his earlier works have survived, but it is known that he tended to repeat successful subjects again and again.  . . .  As his career progressed, d'Oggiono's work gradually shed the influence of Leonardo in favor of artists like Perugino and Leonardo's followers, such as Giampietrino.  He died of the plague shortly after completing an altarpiece of the Virgin and Child in 1524."

– from curator's notes at the Getty Museum

Marco d'Oggiono and Giovanni Agostino da Lodi
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1515
oil on panel
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Marco d'Oggiono
Salvator Mundi
ca. 1500
oil on panel
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Marco d'Oggiono
Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist
ca. 1505-1510
oil on panel
Seattle Art Museum

Marco d'Oggiono
Madonna and Child
ca. 1510-20
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Marco d'Oggiono
The Three Archangels
1517
oil on panel
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Marco d'Oggiono
St Sebastian
1520
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Marco d'Oggiono
St Sebastian
ca. 1520
oil on panel
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

Marco d'Oggiono
Marriage at Cana
ca. 1519-22
detached fresco
Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan

Giovanni Pietro Rizzi, called Giampietrino (active 1508-1549)

Giampietrino after Leonardo da Vinci
Last Supper
ca. 1520
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Giampietrino
Madonna of the Cherries
ca. 1508-1510
oil on panel
private collection

Giampietrino
Salome with the Head of John the Baptist
ca. 1510-30
oil on panel
National Gallery, London

Giampietrino
Penitent Magdalen
ca. 1525-30
oil on panel
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

"None of these artists was so literally imitative of Leonardo as painters less rooted by age in the Quattrocento could become.  Marco d'Oggiono took over Leonardo's types, his chiaroscuro, and in many cases his inventions of motifs more obviously than the older artists, but this apparatus merely cloaks the archaism of the form beneath, and hardly modifies the painter's pedestrian care for realism.  Giampietrino was a more exact exploiter of Leonardo's repertory, not quite so harsh as Marco.  What both do to their model is instructive of the stubbornness in them of traits that are native to their school.  Leonardo's modes of drawing and chiaroscuro are denatured to become descriptive tools, affirming a glossy verity, essentially inert, and his complex and precarious emotion slides off – as so easily it might in imitators' hands – into illustration."

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

Giampietrino
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1530-35
oil on panel
Museo Diocesano, Milan

Giampietrino
Death of Cleopatra
ca. 1524-26
oil on panel
Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Giampietrino
Salvator Mundi
before 1549
tempera on panel
Pushkin Museum, Moscow

attributed to Giampietrino
Leda and her Children
ca. 1525-35
oil on panel
Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel

Giampietrino
Penitent Magdalen
ca. 1520
oil on panel
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Giampietrino
Lucretia
before 1549
oil on panel
Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Giampietrino
St John the Baptist
before 1549
oil on panel
Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

Giampietrino
Virgin and Child
ca. 1510-15
oil on panel
Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

Giampietrino
Virgin and Child
ca. 1525
oil on panel
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Giampietrino
Diana the Huntress
before 1549
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York