Bramantino
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Bartolomeo Suardi, best known as Bramantino (c. 1455 - c. 1535) was an Italian painter and architect.
[edit] Biography
He was born in Milan, the son of Alberto Suardi and his biography appears confusing. There is a mention of a Bramantino da Milano by Vasari in his biographies of Piero della Francesca, Il Garofalo, Girolamo da Carpi, and Jacopo Sansovino. Freedburg cites a pseudo-Bramantino active in Naple in early 1500s as perhaps being Pietro Sardi[1]. The Bramantino of Vasari, if he existed at all, worked for Pope Nicholas V between 1450-55. If so, then he worked prior to the cited works of Bartolomeo Suardi. On the other hand, Bartolomeo Suardi is documented in late 1508 as helping in the decoration of the Vatican Stanze (though by 1509, back in Milan). On the other hand, this Bramantino has the serene and sometimes unnatural quietism of the classicism of Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, and Ercole de Roberti.
Freedburg sustains that Bartolomeo Suardi, born circa 1465, was educated by Donato Bramante, who would have been influenced by the Urbino quattrocento tradition of immobile realism.
[edit] Mature Works
In 1508 he was engaged in Rome. Donato Bramante taught Bramantino architecture, and the pupil assisted the master in the execution of the interior of the church of San Satiro, Milan.
In painting, He executed a number portraits of celebrated personages for the Vatican. His earliest known works are a Nativity (1490s, Brera) and an Ecce Homo (circa 1495, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection)[2]. One of his best known works is somber Adoration of the Magi (1495-98) ,[3] in the National Gallery of London. In addition to the impassive, emotion-dry classicism, and the symmetric geometric logic of purity[4], this figure is notable for the imaginative cut-away of the building revealing a fanciful mountain backdrop.
A Pieta fresco (c 1505, now in Ambrosiana) is in fragmentary state[5]. Before 1508, he designed the tapestries of the Months for Gian Giacom Trivulzio (now in Castello Sforzesco). The Saint Michael Altar (or Enthroned Madonna and child with Saint Ambrogio and Saint Michael) at the Ambrosiana[6], notable for the foreshortened slain man ("Arian heretic") before St Ambrogius and frog (symbolizing a demon) before Saint Michael in the foreground and impassive saints, dates to after 1510. Freedburg sees in this painting a Leonardo-based impulse to circumscribe the painting to a world where near-abstract rigorous geometry, characterized by "looming silhouettes of imagined and unpeopled architecture, constructed with a rule and square, take increasing prominence". The figures, even when trying to betray emotion, appear vacant, distant, "automata" confined as pawns to a geometric exercise, something common to Piero della Francesca's earlier works.
Another masterpieces are the Brera Crucifixion (c. 1510-1520)[5]. In 1525 Bramantino was appointed architect to the court by Duke Francis (II) Sforza, and his aid as an engineer in the defence of Milan brought him a multitude of rewards.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). Pelican History of Art: Painting in Italy, 1500-1600. Penguin Books, pp385-390.
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