The Emilian or Poan Renaissance concerns multiple realities in a dense network of exchanges with all the surrounding areas. In the four and sixteenth century Emilia was divided into several lordships, among which Ferrara degli Este, Bologna dei Bentivoglio, Parma dei Farnese, stood out.

Ferrara
The most vital center of the 14th century in Emilia was Ferrara, where the most diverse artistic personalities met at the Este court, from Pisanello to Leon Battista Alberti, from Jacopo Bellini to Piero della Francesca, from the young Andrea Mantegna to first class foreigners like Rogier van der Weyden and Jean Fouquet. It was during the era of Borso d’Este (in power from 1450 to 1471) that the many artistic ferments of the court were transformed into a peculiar style, especially in painting, characterized by linear tension, expressive exasperation, extreme preciousness combined with strong expressiveness. The birth of the Ferrara school can be found in the decorations of the Studiolo of Belfiore and developed in the frescoes of the Salone di Mesi in Palazzo Schifanoia, where the figures of Cosmè Tura emerged and, in a second moment, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de ‘Roberti.

Even in the sixteenth century, Ferrara confirmed itself as a demanding and avant-garde center in the artistic field. Alfonso d’Este was a fruitful client of Raphael and Titian, while among the local artists he brought out the Garofalo and especially Dosso Dossi. It is the Ariosto season in which even painters are inclined to a suggestive evocative evocation.

Bologna
In Bologna the vital University, the construction site of the Basilica of San Domenico and the liberality of the Bentivoglio family were motives for the attraction of humanists, artists and other personalities, such as the mathematician Luca Pacioli who met Albrecht Dürer at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the city.

Here he studied Leon Battista Alberti and, between 1425 and 1434, he left his masterpiece Jacopo della Quercia, the Porta Magna of the Basilica of San Petronio. In the seventies of the fifteenth century, the Ferrarese Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de ‘Roberti worked in the city, which included, among other things, the Griffoni Polyptych and the Garganelli Chapel, works that had a profound influence especially on the sculptors. Niccolò dell’Arca, active at the Arca of San Domenico, created a famousLamentation over the dead Christ (about 1485), of a poignant emotional explosion, inspired by the Burgundian plastic, the last Donatello and, probably, the frescoes by the Ferrarese, of which only some fragments of touching realism remain today. The vital example, however, fell back into the void: in the successive sculptural groups of the Modena Guido Mazzoni the tones are much more conciliatory and conventional. Even in painting, after the return of Ercole de ‘Roberti to Ferrara, local artists relied on the most peaceful Umbrian – Florentine ways.

In 1494 – 1495 the young exiled Michelangelo stayed in Bologna, protected by the noble Giovan Francesco Aldovrandini, he found employment with the Dominicans, for whom he made some statues of the Arca of San Domenico, where he anticipated that expressive gravitas of some later masterpieces such as the David. Recent studies underline the importance of this stay in the artist’s training, which studied the ways of representing the restrained energy and the expressive variations of Jacopo della Quercia and of the Ferrara works, drawing fundamental inspirations in the maturation of their style. Already affirmed, he returned to Bologna in1507 – 1508 to reconcile with Pope Julius II and create a bronze sculpture of the blessing Pope, destroyed during the riots of 1511.

In order to have a real “Bolognese school”, the sixteenth century had to wait, when a group of artists worked on the frescoes of the oratory of Santa Cecilia (1504-1506). Among the young talents were Francesco Francia, Lorenzo Costa and above all Amico Aspertini, author of a personal reinterpretation of Raphael with an exhilarating expressive vein, to the limits of the grotesque.

In 1514 the cardinal Lorenzo Pucci brought to the city the altarpiece of the Ecstasy of Santa Cecilia by Raphael, an important milestone in the development of the altarpiece in the sixteenth century and a fundamental example for the seventeenth-century school in Emilia.

Parma
The other center in Emilia that benefited from an important school was Parma. After a sleepy Quattrocento, the new century was a crescendo of novelties and great masters, with Filippo Mazzola, Correggio and Parmigianino. The real “factory” of talent was the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, rebuilt by 1519 and decorated by Correggio and a team of young promises destined to become famous artists.

Correggio’s career, a great renewal of tradition, was marked by three major fresco cycles in Parma: the chamber of the Abbess in the convent of San Paolo (1518), the decoration in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista (1520-1523) and the dome of the Cathedral of Parma with the Assumption (1526-1530). In these works, moving away more and more from the fifteenth-century spatial rules, he put on scenographic solutions of refined artifice, which already laid the foundations, with a century of advance, for the great Baroque decoration.

Parmigianino instead was a more restless teacher, in some ways eccentric, interested since the early years in graphics, optics and alchemy. He gave proof of his originality in works such as the self – portrait in a convex mirror (1524), with a very particular perceptual rendering. He favored the tapered forms, the smooth and compact fields, the almost enamelled color, with a sharp definition of the shapes, opposed to the soft corrugal light intonation.

Source from Wikipedia