Paris Bordone

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Venus and Mars with Cupid by Paris Bordone, painted from 1559 to 1560.

Paris Bordon or Bordone (1495 – January 19, 1570), was a Venetian painter of the Renaissance, who while training with Titian, maintained a strand of mannerist complexity and provincial vigor.

[edit] Biography

Bordone was born at Treviso, but had moved to Venice by late adolescence. He apprenticed briefly and unhappily (according to Vasari with Titian. Vasari may have met the elder Bordone.

From the 1520s, we have works by Bordone including the Holy Family in Florence, Sacra Conversazione with Donor (Glasgow), and Holy Family with St. Catherine (Hermitage Museum). The St. Ambrose and a Donor (1523) is now in Brera. In 1525-6, Bordone painted an altarpiece for the church of S. Agostino in Crema, a Madonna with St. Christopher and St George (now in the Palazzo Tadini collection at Lovere). A second altarpiece, Pentecost, is now in Brera gallery.

In 1534-5, he painted his large-scale masterpiece for the Scuola di San Marco a canvas of the Fisherman delivering the Marriage Ring of Venice to the Doge (Accademia). However, when this latter painting is compared to the near-contemoporary, and structurally similar, Presentation of the Virgin ^[1], Bordone's limitations, his use of superior perspective, which creates dwarfed distant perspectives, and limited coloration relative to the brilliant tints of Titian.

Bordone is best at his smaller cabinet pieces, showing half-figures, semi-undressed men and women from mythology or religious stories in a muscular interaction despite the crowded space.

Paris Bordone subsequently executed many important mural paintings in Venice, Treviso and Vicenza, all of which have perished. In 1538 he was invited to France by Francis I, at whose court he painted many portraits, though no trace of them is to be found in French collections, the two portraits at the Louvre being later acquisitions. On his return journey he he also worked for the Fugger palace at Augsburg^[2].

Bordone's pictures are of unequal merit, and often repeat postures, including the drape an overarching arm over the superior portion of the canvas. In 1900 the committee of the fourth centenary of Paris Bordone, Treviso, published L. Barb and G. Biscaros Della Vita e delle Opere di Paris Bordone; and the Nuova Antologia (November, 16, 1900) contains a sixteen-page paper on Paris Bordone by P. G. Molmenti.

[edit] Partial Anthology

The National Gallery, London, has a Daphnis and Chloe and a portrait of a lady, whilst a Holy Family from his brush is at Bridgwater House. Other important works of his are the Madonna in the Tadini collection at Lovere, the paintings in the Duomo of Treviso, two mythological pictures at the Galleria Borghese and the Doria palace in Rome, the Chess Players in Berlin, a very little-known portrait of superb quality in the possession of the landgrave of Hesse at Kronberg, and a Baptism of Christ in Philadelphia.