Niccolò dell'Abbate

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Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1540). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
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Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1540). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Baby Moses on the Water (1560). Musée du Louvre.
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Baby Moses on the Water (1560). Musée du Louvre.

Nicolò dell' Abate, sometimes Niccolò, (1509 or 1512 – 1571) was an Italian Mannerist painter and decorator, of the Emilian school, who became a member of the School of Fontainebleau that introduced the Renaissance to France.

[edit] Biography

Niccolò dell'Abbate was born in Modena, the son of a sculptor.

He trained in the studio of a local Modenese sculptor, his early influence including Ferrarese painters such as Garofalo and Dosso Dossi. He specialized in long friezes with secular and mythological subjects, notably in the Palazzo dei Beccherie (1537), in various rooms in the Rocca of the counts Boiardo at Scandiano, especially a courtly ceiling Concert composed of a ring of young musicians seen in perspective, sotto in su (early 1540s), and the Hercules Room in the Rocca dei Meli Lupi at Soragna (c. 1540–43), and possibly the loggia frescoes removed from Palazzo Casotti at Reggio Emilia.

His style was matured when he moved to Bologna in 1547; there he came under wider influences, notably Correggio and Parmigianino—whose name was formerly attached to Nicolò's Portrait of a Young Man. He spent most of his time in Bologna painting characteristically elaborate and detailed landscapes and aristocratic genre scenes of hunting, courtly love-making paralleled in mythological amours. It was during this time that he decorated the Palazzo Poggi, and executed a cycle of decors illustrating the Romance Orlando Furioso in the ducal palace at Sassuolo, near Modena.

Nicolò moved to France in 1552 and remained there until his death. In France he worked at the royal Château de Fontainebleau as a member of the decorating team under the direction of Francesco Primaticcio. Within two years of his arrival he was drawing a project for a decor commemorating Anne de Montmorency (preparatory drawing at the Louvre). In Paris he frescoed the chapel ceiling in the Hôtel de Guise (destroyed), following Primaticcio's designs. For private commissions he executed portable canvases of mythological subjects sited in landscapes. An easily overlooked aspect of the commissions 16th-century artists carried out were the ephemeral festive decorations that celebrated special occasions in the court circle, such as the triumphal entry into Paris staged for Charles IX and his bride Elisabeth of Austria in 1571, the year of Nicolò's death.

Nicolò is remembered mostly for his mythologizing landscapes, which inspired later artists such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, and for his profuse and elegant drawings.

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