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Bernardino Fungai

Bernardino Fungai (1460 – 1516) was an Italian Sienese painter of the late fifteenth century. His paintings of Bernardino Fungai are rather conventional. Most of his works are in Siena, distributed among various churches and in the National Picture Gallery of Siena.

Fungai is thought to have studied under local painters in his native city of Siena, despite very little being known of his career. He is described as a retadataire follower of Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo. His paintings evince an influence from local Sienese painters and also Pietro Perugino.

Son of Niccolò and Battista di Tonio His art is to be considered as a passage between the Gothic and early Renaissance Renaissance. In 1482 he was put into a workshop by Benvenuto di Giovanni. His work can be attributed to that of Sienese primitivism near Matteo di Giovanni, Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo, Giacomo Pacchiarotti and Pietro di Francesco Orioli.

In 1482, he worked on frescoes for the cupola in the Siena Cathedral. Fungai was commissioned in 1494 to decorate ceremonial banners with azure and gold.

In 1484 it was assumed that his visit and stay in Rome on the occasion of the ascent to the pontificate of Innocent VIII where he is thought to have worked with Perugino and Antoniazzo Romano, from whom he was influenced or perhaps influenced himself.

His most famous work is the frescoes for the dome of the Siena Cathedral painted around 1490.

Back in Siena in 1487 he made most of his paintings like those for the Pienza Seminary. On the occasion of the entry of the King of France, Charles VIII, in 1494, he was invited to paint some boards for the festivities given by the city.

Among his learned students were Giacomo Pacchiarotti and Girolamo del Pacchia

He also created an altarpiece in 1512 for a Sienese church. A Communion of St Catherine of Siena is found in the Galleria Borghese. There are paintings by this painter at the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables, Florida and the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow, Russia.

Work:
The many devotional paintings of Bernardino Fungai are rather conventional but his few cassone paintings and the landscapes in his larger devotional compositions show his narrative gift. The quality of his landscapes is already clear in Bernardino Fungai’s earliest recorded work dated to 1495-97, a Stigmatisation of St Catherine in the Santuario Cateriniano at Fontebranda. The composition reveals a panorama of graceful buildings, gentle hills and tall trees with an extensive sea in the back enlivened with small boats. The contrast in the composition between the solid, hard-edged and hieratic figures of the main scene and the small background and predella figures with dancelike poses and freely moving drapery is also typical of his style.

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In the sanctuary of Saint Catherine of Siena, precisely in the Oratory of the Kitchen, are displayed the stigmata of St. Catherine among the saints Girolamo and Domenico and Santa Caterina in glory among saints, a complex also equipped with a rich predella with stories of the life of Santa (1495-1497)

In the Basilica of St. Clement in Santa Maria dei Servi: Coronation of the Virgin and Saints (1501)

For the Basilica of San Domenico he painted the predella of the Nativity of Jesus of Francis by Giorgio Martini. The five painted scenes are the Vision of St. Catherine, the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, the Strage of Innocents, the Sermon of Saint Dominic and the Magdalen in the Desert

In the Church and Convent of Santa Margherita, Castelvecchio, he made the fresco of the refectory with the Last Supper.

In the Church of Santa Maria in Portico in Fontegiusta: The Coronation of the Virgin and Saints Sigismondo, Giovanni Battista, Rocco and Girolamo, realized between 1508 and 1512.

For the Convent of San Girolamo in Siena: the Assumption of Mary.

Saint Benedict Tempted in the Wilderness by Bernardino Fungai1415 – 1420

This painting represents an episode in the life of Saint Benedict. Having retired to live in a cave on Mount Subiaco, he was tormented by the devil in the guise of a blackbird, afflicting him with strong erotic temptations. To overcome desire, the saint stripped himself naked and rolled in a thicket of briars and nettles. The angel represents the divine enlightenment which helped Benedict resist the sin.
The anatomy of the saint, his loincloth, the blackbird and the leaves of the bushes are rendered with great naturalistic fidelity, as is the modulation of the light which models the volumes. By contrast, elegant Gothic touches define the figure of the angel with its brilliantly coloured wings and blue mantle.
The painting, dating from about 1415-1420, is the work of Nicolò di Pietro, a Venetian artist influenced by Gentile da Fabriano. The panel originally formed part of a polyptych. Three other panels with scenes of the life of Saint Benedict are now in the Uffizi.

Madonna and Child with Two Hermit Saints by Bernardino Fungaiearly 1480s

In a typically Sienese manner, Bernardino Fungai mingled elements of Gothic art–a tooled gold background–with the new Renaissance ideas of three-dimensionality. Fungai presented the hermit saints in three-quarter view to display his knowledge of the new concept of foreshortening, yet he retained a typically Sienese interest in decorative patterning, as seen in the Virgin’s elaborate drapery. He tilted Christ’s painted halo in perspective, but he incised those of the saints and the Virgin into the background. Fungai also effectively employed the characteristic linear harmonies of Sienese art in the gentle contours of the docile Virgin’s mantle, the subtle scallops of her white headgear, the fluttery end of Christ’s transparent drapery, and the saints’ wavy beards.

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