Rosso Fiorentino
Giovan Battista of Jacopo di Gasparre, known as Rosso Fiorentino (Florence, March 8, 1495 – Fontainebleau, November 14, 1540), was an Italian Mannerist painter, in oil and fresco, belonging to the Florentine school. He was one of the main exponents of the so-called “eccentric Florentines,” the pioneers of painting mannerism.
Like Pontormo, his pictorial alter ego for many years, he was a student of Andrea del Sarto and was, in many respects, a rebel against the classicist constraints now in crisis. Starting from his master’s balanced constructions, he forced the forms to express a restless and tormented world. He was an original and nonconformist artist who received a warm consensus in Florence, Rome, before retiring to the Umbrian-Tuscan province. From here he made the big step, moving to the court of Fontainebleau, where he became the most esteemed court painter of Francis I of France, a position already occupied by his master Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci. Along with Francesco Primaticcio, who succeeded him, he brought the sophisticated and elite taste of Clementine Rome before Sacco, becoming the spark that lit international manierism and the school of Fontainebleau.
A document is reminiscent of the artist born in Florence, in the people of San Michele Visdomini, March 18 at eight o’clock in the year, according to Florentine use, 1494, or 1495 according to Gregorian calculus. From there a few months in the suburbs of Empoli the Pontormo, an artist with whom Red shared a good part of his formation and the very original outcomes of their respective formal researches, was born. The nickname of “Red” came from his whip hair, as vasari also remembers.
The latter, at the beginning of the biography that dedicated him to the Lives, reminded him of a good-looking, charming, gentle and refined person interested in various activities, including music and letters. The historian of Arezzo used both his direct knowledge of the artist in his youth and the memories gathered by the Bronzino.
The first document recalling the Adolescent Red dates back to 1510 when it is qualified as a painter, followed by a payment dated September 13, 1513, in which the artist, almost 20 years old, is paid for the first work of which he has news, four hands With Andrea of Cosimo Feltrini, a coat of arms of Lion X at the Most Holy Anniversary, in honor of the Medici Pope elected just that year. Two other painted coats of arms were paid to him shortly after and in the same month he participated in the execution of a votive image in the wax of Giuliano de ‘Medici, Duke of Nemour for the same sanctuary of the Annunciation, according to the use of offering ex-vote In wax to the miraculous image of the Florentine Annunciation. Probably the Medici wanted solemnly to thank Our Lady for the reconquest of the city after the restoration of the Republic. Another coat of arms (of the newcomer Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci) was paid in October / November and between that date and June 1514 we recorded the balance for the first sure work we received from the artist, the Assumption of the Virgin in the Cloister of the Votes.
To such an important commission, the artist had come to the suggestion of Andrea del Sarto, responsible for the realization of much of the cloister lunettes. At the end of the business, Andrea delegated to some of his best collaborators the painting of the remaining lunettes, relying on the Franciabigio, Pontormo and, precisely, Rosso. The Red still had a particular connection with the Annunziata, which was drawn from Vasari to friendship with the friar “master Giacopo”; In addition, two brothers of the artist were friars, one of whom (Filippo Maria) was actually served at Annunziata (the other was Dominican in Santa Maria Novella).
For Vasco’s master Giacopo, Rosso painted a Madonna with the half-figure of St. John the Evangelist, of whom there is perhaps only the ancient copy of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours, in which the Child is represented by his shoulders Gave way to an elaborate twist to the spectator: the synthesis of forms, however, refers to the example of Fra Bartolomeo more than to Andrea del Sarto.
Vasari remembers him as one of the painters who studied the cardboard of the Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo, a painter who certainly influenced all the next generation, he understood, but that Red reworked with an even brutal sense of movement, more unnatural colors And more detached from tradition.
The archaeologist later mentioned a tabernacle for the Bartoli family in the Marignolle area, where the artist began to show “his opinion contrary to manners.” The work, in a bad condition but readable in composition, was recently found (published in 2006) by Antonio Natali, a little outside the Marignolle area in the people of Sant’Ilario in Colombaia, at the top of the street where the Monastery of Campora and where Piero Bartoli, the client, had his own home. He shows a Madonna on the head of the Holy Sepulcher (a reference to the intimulation of the nearby monastery, with his feet a dead Christ supported by Giuseppe d’Arimatea and a Saint Jerome.
In those years, the artist, whom Vasari recalled as “with a few masters”, must look with equal interest both at St. Mark’s school (dominated by Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli), and in the Annunziata (dominated by Andrea del Sarto And his collaborators), and perhaps even that of Francesco Granacci. Collaboration with Andrea del Sarto is documented only by Vasarian hints, as is the case of the lost predella of the Annunciation of St. Gallen, painted in collaboration with Pontormo. He was also interested in the sculpture by Jacopo Sansovino and Baccio Bandinelli. Contacts had to be with eccentric Alonso Berruguete, a Spanish artist who moved to Florence.
He enrolled a painter, establishing the end of his apprenticeship in 1517.
In 1518, Rosso made an important commission for an altarpiece, the so-called Spare Ship, from the role of the buyer Leonardo Buonafede, originally destined for the church of Ognissanti. Despite the originality of the table, with a tight composition that tends to close towards the center, Buonafede rejected her, after seeing her in the opera since, as Vasari recalled, the artist had accentuated the features “cruel and desperate” Of the characters, which would then dampen and normalize in the final version. After making the changes, the blade was finally destined for a small church in the province.
In the same period there are also the Ulysses musician Angiolino, a fragment of a lost blade, and the Allegory of Salvation of Lacma, where the characters are captured with unusual dramatic, sometimes irreverent accents, in details such as the skeletal hand of St. Elizabeth . In these works the colors are rarer, the design comes to the peak of expressionism that caricature, even thinking of German art of the twentieth century for irrationality and implicit comic. His is a form of protest against the canonical idealization of the Renaissance human figure, perhaps unconscious, towards a more bizarre art, which does not fear being sometimes cruel and deformed.
From the beginning of the 1920s, Rosso had to find the province’s environment more congenial to his art, to carry on his radical innovations in figurative language without the constraints imposed by Florentine formalism. In addition, a November 1518 condemnation forced the artist to indemnify one of his creditors and, being unable to pay, one month later had been publicly declared insolvent in the city by notice.
In these years Rosso went to Piombino, called by Jacopo V Appiani, for whom, according to Vasari, he painted a “beautiful dead Christ”, a “cappelluccia” and, perhaps, his portrait. Probably the shovel was in the altar of the Society of the Body of Christ in the church of Sant’Antimo, as seems to confirm a payment by the brothers to the artist. The Appianes were also anti-Semitic, and it is possible that Reds himself had sought shelter as a political republican and, most likely, Savonarolian. There is a two-year gap in the biography of Red, in which Natali suggested a possible trip to Naples, based on a letter from Summonte that talks about the presence in the city of a “Florentine Ioan Baptista” and portraits of ladies of Aragonese courtesy that could derive from the original lost of Red.
In 1521 Volterra then arrived, where he later returned. Here, in addition to the Deposition, he painted the Madonna and saints in the Villamagna church.
The Deposition of Volterra (1521) is considered its masterpiece, similar to the shape of the table and the measures, besides the theme, that of the Pontormo, but it differs deeply from the conception. The Red gets the drama for the angular volumetry that faces the figures, for the convulsive movement of some characters, for the intense, mostly shiny colors laid on the uniform expanse of the sky. The deformations of bodies and faces come to the utmost exasperation: the old man facing the cross has his face contracted as a mask. The asymmetrical arrangement of the stairs generates a violent motion, accentuated by the uncertainty of the support of men who lower the body of Christ, while the light strikes from the right with force, creating fiery chiaroscuro bumps.
Between the end of 1521 and the beginning of 1522 the artist returned to Florence where he performed his last commissions in his city, such as the Pala Dei (1522), the Bridegroom of the Virgin (1523) and Moses defends the daughters of Jetro (About 1522-1523), the latter donated to the King of France Francis I.
These are works commissioned in the Republican and Savonarolian philosophical circles, to which the artist could have approached. Vasari recalled an anecdote about this period, according to which the artist came into conflict with the friars of Santa Croce, near his home in the Tintori, by a monkey, a “bertuccione”, a thief of grapes and Author of bad facts. It is not unlikely that the animal has become a model for the animal face that appears in the Deposition of Sansepolcro.
At the end of 1523 or at the beginning of the following year, accompanied by the inseparable student Battistino and “Bertuccione”, Rosso left Florence to go to Rome. It is supposed that the artist had already been, for a very short period, in the papal city, as early as 1511. This time there were a number of reasons related to his departure: first of all the fresh election of a Florentine pope, Giulio de ‘Doctors went up to Clement VII, and in the city there was an acute recurrence of an endemic plague, the same thing that caused Andrea del Sarto in the Mugello countryside and Pontormo at the Carthage of Florence. Also in 1522 he returned from Rome to Florence Perin del Vaga, always because of a pestilence, which had to give rise to a dispute with his fellow Florentines (of which Vasari also speaks) about the most up-to-date figurative culture, praising Without reservation that great “modern way” being staged at the papal court by Michelangelo, Raffaello and other craftsmen, and provokingly accusing him of excessive attachment to the past of his interlocutors. Red’s curiosity had to be sufficiently tickled to go directly to those portents.
The arrival in Rome of the Red, already out of the question of the success of some of his paintings sent there, appeared under the best auspices and the first commission he expected was the fresco of the Cesi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, where he painted a Creation of Eve An Original Pity (1524), as well as the famous Backbone Party in Boston today. In these works he recalled the art of Raffaello, that of Michelangelo in the Stories of Genesis and the ancient one, inspired by a profoundly profane taste. However, these works did not have to have the hoped-for effect, as Vasari testified, who criticized the frescoes and talked of horrified works. This judgment seems to be excessive today, though frescoes are not among the best achievements of his brush; Instead, the Fall was surely a masterpiece, incredibly in balance between the religious theme and the profane, undeniably sensual performance in the naked body of Christ full of recalls to Michelangelo and the ancient statuary.
Another work reminded by Vasari during the Roman stay is a sketch of a Decollation of St. John the Baptist in the church of San Giacomo in Scossacavalli, a work that might have to be completed by another artist, lying on an altar at the time of the historic aretino , But of which the traces were lost.
Cellini also remembered seeing Red in the castle of Cerveteri, a guest of the count of Anguillara, probably in the summer of 1524. Some have recognized a possible portrait of the count in the Portrait of man with helmet, today in Liverpool.
Ultimately, though, Rosso’s stay in Rome did not have to be the happiest if he had a long time to devote himself to preparing drawings to draw engravings, as evidenced by various series by Jacopo Caraglio: the thirty-one Gods within the niches, the Twelve Fatigues of Hercules, the so-called Fury, the Love of Gods, the Pieridi Challenge (of which there is still a pictorial version attributed to the master and today the Louvre), the Battle of the Romans with the Sabines. These are often violent expressive works, in which the artist could make use of his entire study of classical statues, most notably Hellenistic.
With the Sacco di Roma in 1527 Red was forced to flee, taking part in the diaspora of artists who so benefited the peripheral centers of Italy and Europe. The Red, first captured by the German Lanzichenecchi, was first harassed (his clothes were stolen, humiliated and forced to heavy work), then left free.
The artist repaired in Perugia, where Vasari remembers that he left a lost cardboard for an Adoration of the Magi, left as a thank-you for hospitality to the painter Domenico Alfani. The work remains a print version of Cherubino Alberti and the blade that carried the Alfani for the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to Castel Rigone, now in unknown location.
In Umbria, he had to hold back the necessary money before finding another accommodation, moving quickly to Sansepolcro, under the protection of bishop Leonardo Tornabuoni, for whom he had already painted the dead Christ in Rome. Between the two, and almost the same age, good relations had to exist, and both had been fleeing from Rome after Sacco. On September 23, 1527, he received an important commission from the local Holy Cross Society on the intercession of Bishop Tornabuoni, to paint an altarpiece with the deceased Christ, again on the subject already addressed in Rome. The assignment had already been entrusted to the local painter Raffaellino del Colle, and he himself, contrary to the will of the confreres, passed it generously to the Red, so that in the city “something remained of it”, as Vasari remembers. It is very probable that thanking Rosso had to give a series of drawings to his colleague, a bit like he had done in Perugia; Traces of markedly reddish influence are met at the Incoronation of the Virgin of Raffaellino in the Civic Museum (1526-1527), in which there are figures “to the Roman”, a Maddalena that recalls the holy knees of the Pala Dei, an unpublished cangiantismo And swelling of the draperies, especially in those of the saint.
Between 1527 and 1528 he realized the burial controversy on the deposed Christ, now in the church of San Lorenzo in Sansepolcro.
At the beginning of the spring of 1528, Rosso was in Arezzo, where he met seventeen-year-old Giorgio Vasari, to whom he gave a drawing for a Resurrection, later painted by the young man for Lorenzo Gamurrini and now dispersed.
On the 1st of July of the same year, Red was the town of Castello, signing the contract for a large boulder for the local Companions from Corpus Domini, where a “resurrected and glorious” Christ was foreseen, four saints and, below, “more And different figures that denote, represent the populace, with those angels that he [the painter] will be about to get together. ” It is the Christ resurrected in glory today in the local Diocesan Museum, working from laborious gestation. The roof of the room given to the painter as a laboratory collapsed in fact by damaging the support (as it is still seen on the boards of the table), then the painter was such a fever that made him return as soon as possible to the more familiar Sansepolcro. Here, however, he falls ill of quartan, so he moved to Pieve Santo Stefano “to take the air”: here he probably designed the design with the St. Stephen’s Lapidazione, from which Cherubino Alberti took an engraving. He came back from Arezzo and finally settled back to Sansepolcro, from which he completed the table of Città di Castello, without ever making it visible to the clients during execution, as Vasari remembers. This precaution was perhaps dictated by the fear of the rejection of the ‘ Works, given the semi-fined state of many characters and the variation of some of the terms of the contract, such as the lack of angels in the finished work.
At this time, two altar projects, both at the British Museum (No. 1948-4-10-15 and pp. 2-19), usually show a remarkable practice with architectural design (also mentioned by Vasari ), Who had to make the most of the fruit there shortly in France.
In Arezzo was also involved in the fresco decoration of the church of the Madonna delle Lacrime, now known as the church of Santissima Annunziata, by the painter who hosted him during the forced pause of works at Città di Castello, Benedetto Spadari, and another friend as well artist, Giovanni Antonio Lappoli. On November 22, 1528, for Niccolò Soggi’s dismissal, the contract was revoked by the complainants, on November 24 of that same year the supply was redone to Rosso, who pledged to guarantee the Lappoli to complete the decoration in the Twenty-six months, without taking any other jobs except for that of the City of Castello blade already in place. The artist came to work producing many drawings, many of which came to us, which were seen, copied and described by Vasari.
However, when on September 17, 1529, most of the Florentine troops that protected Arezzo retired to the capital to protect themselves from the impending attack of Imperial troops, Rosso, still remembered the traumatic facts of the Sacco di Roma two years earlier, not feeling safe in Town repairs once more in Sansepolcro, leaving the drawings and the cartons for the Madonna delle Lacrime in a citadel, or in the fortress, as Vasari remembers, and as is then accurately attested by an inventory of March 12, 1532 when peace came back Two trimmers in the local Company from the Most Holy Annunziata. As they are the Red ones, they are listed with numerous designs, some clothing, and some books that allow to rebuild the Red Library, at least the one that did not bring with it: Naturalis historia of Pliny, an identifiable bound volume With the Cornucopia by Niccolò Perotti, two unspecified “bookcases”, the Cortegiano by Baldassarre Castiglione, the Vitruvio’s De architectura and a book of devotion to the Virgin.
Vasari recalled that he had explicitly discussed with Red the opportunities that the court of France offered in those years to Italian artists (and in particular Tuscans), so as to directly bring the dialogue into the Scenes where it is remembered that the Red “always had a whim To end his life in France and, as he said, he said, to a certain misery and poverty in which men are working in Tuscany and in the countries where they are born. ”
The opportunity to get away from Sansepolcro was accelerated by a fact that threw bad light on the painter in the city: on a saint Thursday of 1530 (April 14), his pupil was caught in a church to fire with the Greek pitch to practice the piromancy ; Rosso, who probably was with him, according to Vasari, escaped night time and, passing through Pesaro, he took refuge in Venice.
In those years the lagoon town was sheltered by many Florentine anti-Medicians, many of whom took the road to France where they found protection under Francis I: it was the case of Louis Alamanni, Zanobi Buondelmonti, Antonio Brucioli and many other intellectuals; Michelangelo himself was there for the siege of Florence (1529), and he was planning to go to France, although the occasion did not materialize. The Red was hosted by Pietro Aretino, for whom he designed a Mars and Venus. The work at Louvre’s Cabinet des Dessins (1575) was perhaps a celebratory peace allegory between France and Spain and was perhaps destined to be donated to the French king as a sort of business card for the artist .
Some hypothesize that it was Buonarroti himself, when he left Venice, to recommend the Red Conqueror to the French ambassador Lazare de Baïf; The hypothesis is, however, unreliable and perhaps the intermediary was more likely to be Aretino himself. In any case in the autumn of 1530 the Red was already in Paris in the footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto who had preceded it at the French court.
Accepted by the king, which, according to Vasari, was struck by his art, his personal qualities and the way he acted, Rosso received a commission of 400 shields, a house in Paris (where he lived little, passing the most Part of his time at the castle of Fontainebleau) and the nomination as head of all the “real factories”, paintings and ornaments: such news already presuppose the fame of Red with the king thanks to the Florentines and the aretines present to his Court, both as a painter and as an architect. For him, after all, he had already owned the original Moses for defending the daughters of Ietro, and other works that were lost or dispersed. Among these, an inventory of 1625 mentions a Judith with the head of Oloferne (of which there is a print version of René Boyvin, a controversy of Pieridi (perhaps in the Louvre), the Leda with the swan designed by Michelangelo (perhaps that of the National Gallery of London), and the quadrant with Mars and Venus (of which there is a drawing in the Louvre).
Among the first projects carried out for the king there was a project perhaps for a sculptural relief of Saints Peter and Paul (known by engravings). Of the success of Red in Fontainebleau, in addition to the Vasari biography, there are traces written in Michelangelo’s paper, like the letter sent by Piacenza from Antonio Mini to Buonarroti (1531), in which it is recalled that some Florentines returning from the court of France have found the Red “gra” master of money and other provisions “, or the one sent from Lyon where the” very good commission “or that of 2 January 1532, also from Lyons, reiterates that it was seen the Red go Riding among many servants and with the saddles covered with rich cloths.
Despite the wealth of documents, the ten-year-old work of Red in France is largely unknown. Two paintings are described in detail by Vasari as executed right after the painter arrived in France and before Primaticcio (1532). If little and nothing is known about Love and Psyche, which perhaps can be identified in the Love and Venus of which a drawing is kept in the Louvre, Bacco and Venus have been identified with caution in the painting of Bacco, Venus and Love in the Musée National d ‘histoire et d’art of the city of Luxembourg.
At Fontainebleau Castle he began working in the Pomona Pavilion (1532-1535, already on the first floor, now no longer existing) probably designed by him in architecture as well as frescoed with Stories of Vertumno and Pomona along with Primaticcio. Among the other aids mentioned in his French companies were Lorenzo Naldini, Domenico del Barbiere, Lionard Fiammingo, Francesco Caccianemici, Giovan Battista Bagnacavallo and Luca Penni.
More complex was the decoration of the Gallery of Francis I, completed in architecture in 1530 and begun between 1533 and 1535, with stucco, paintings and a complex system of symbols and triumphalist allusions. The first work of the genre in France is now hardly readable for the many reminiscences and changes that have happened over the centuries. In the foreign country his research on color, on movement, his originality at all cost, he drifted, attenuating in a slimmer and elegant manner.
In 1532 the king gave him the canonical status of Sainte-Chapelle and in 1537 of Notre-Dame. Vasari recalled how the artist in France faced numerous works, including drawings of “salters, jars, hooves and other bizarre” designs for horses, masks, triumphs and all the other things that They can imagine, and so weird and weird fantasies that can not be done better. ” Of all these efforts today there is very little, including some extraordinary works (such as the First Vision of Petrarca of Laura’s Death, 1534, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford) and some engravings from his projects (such as the Costumes of the Three Parcels of Pierre Milan).
Of the French period there is only one work surely attributable to the hand of the Red, the Pietà del Louvre, painted for the convertible Anne de Montmorency, whose weapon appears.
French sources huddle on the death of Red, while Vasari describes a sudden overturning of his fortunes, which led him to suicide. Many people have expressed their doubts about this information, but if it is not confirmed by documents, it is not even rebuttable.
Illegally accused of theft, the painter and friend Francesco di Pellegrino, who for torture was also subjected to torture, the Red was assaulted in guilt, even for the violent reaction of the accused. He obtained a powerful poison and committed suicide on November 14, 1540. All the works that had been commissioned at court were then entrusted to Francesco Primaticcio, who gave birth, continuing in Red’s work at the Fontainebleau School.
Often, Red made numerous preparatory drawings of its paintings, of which only a part of it has come. In particular there was a corpus of drawings relating to the period of Fontainebleau, which had several owners, and was divided into several steps, between Cherubino Alberti, Gian Giacomo Caraglio, René Boyvin and others. The term Fontainebleau School was used for the first time in 1818 to mark and rearrange the preparatory drawings of the castle frescoes, which were often in non-marked sheets.