Gian Paolo Lomazzo

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Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo

Self-portrait
Born 26 April 1538
Milan
Died 27 January 1592
Milan
Nationality Italian
Field Painting, Art Criticism
Movement Italian Renaissance
Madonna and Saints, Church of San Marco, Milan

Gian Paolo Lomazzo (26 April 1538 – 27 January 1592; his first name is sometimes also given as "Giovan" or "Giovanni") was an Italian painter, best remembered for his writings on art theory, belonging to the second generation that produced Mannerism in Italian art and architecture.

Gian Paolo Lomazzo was born in Milan from a family emigrated from the town of Lomazzo. His early training was with Giovan Battista della Cerva in Milan. He painted a large Allegory of the Lenten Feast for San Agostino in Piacenza (1567). Other works by his hand include an elaborate dome with Glory of Angels for the Capella Foppa in San Marco in Milan, and the Fall of Simon Magus in the wall of the chapel.

Lomazzo became blind in 1571, and turned to writing, producing two complex treatises that are milestones in the development of art criticism. His first work, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) is in part a guide to contemporary concepts of decorum, which the Renaissance inherited in part from Antiquity, which controlled a consonance between the functions of interiors and the kinds of painted and sculpted decors that would be suitable. Lomazzo offered a systematic codification of esthetics typical of the increasingly formalized and academic approaches prevalent during the later sixteenth century.

Lomazzo's less practical and more metaphysical Idea del tempio della pittura ("The ideal temple of painting", 1590) offers a description along the lines of the "four temperaments" theory of human nature and personality, containing the explanations of the role of individuality in judgment and artistic invention.

Lomazzo's criticism took into account three aspects of art criticism: doctrina, the record of discoveries— such as perspective— that artists had made in the course of history; prattica, the personal preferences and maniera of the artist, and iconography, the literary element in arts. Lomazzo’s contribution to art criticism was his systematic extraction of abstract concepts from art, not merely a recounting of the marvels of verisimilitude and technique and anecdotes of the works' reception among contemporaries of the type that Giorgio Vasari had reported in the previous generation.

Giovanni Ambrogio Figino and Girolamo Ciocca were his pupils.

References

  • Kemp, M.: 'Equal Excellences': Lomazzo And The Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts, in Renaissance Studies vol 1.1, March 1987.
  • Lomazzo, Gian Paolo: Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura [Milano 1584] in Scritti sulle arti Vol. II, Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Florence 1974.
  • Romano, G., Giovan paolo Lomazzo, in Gaudenzio Ferrari e la sua scuola: i cartoni cinquecenteschi dell'Accademia Albertina, Torino 1982
  • J. Lynch, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s self portrait in the Brera, in «Gazette des Beaux Arts», LXIV, 1964, pp. 189 ss.
  • Manegold, C.: Wahrnehmung - Bild - Gedächtnis. Studien zur Rezeption der aristotelischen Gedächnistheorie in den kunsttheoretischen Schriften des Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo; Ph.D. thesis. Published as Studien zur Kunstgeschichte vol. 158; Olms 2004. ISBN 3-487-12675-3. In German.
  • Lomazzo, G. P. Rabisch, edited by D. Isella, Torino 1993
  • Rabisch. Il grottesco nell’arte del Cinquecento. L’Accademia della Val di Blenio, Lomazzo e l’ambiente milanese, edited by M. Kahn-Rossi and F. Porzio, Milano 1998
  • Isella, D., Lombardia stravagante, Torino 2005

External links

Media related to Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo at Wikimedia Commons

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