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Gaudenzio Ferrari

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Gaudenzio Ferrari
Christ rising from the Tomb, London, National Gallery
Christ rising from the Tomb, London, National Gallery
Born c. 1471
Valduggia, Valsesia, Duchy of Milan
Died January 11, 1546 (aged 74–75)
Milan, Duchy of Milan
Education Giovanni Stefano Scotti
Movement Italian Renaissance

Gaudenzio Ferrari (c. 1471 – 11 January 1546) was an Italian painter and sculptor of the Renaissance.

Biography

Early life and education

Gaudenzio was born to Franchino Ferrari at Valduggia in Valsesia in the Duchy of Milan. Valduggia is now in the province of Vercelli in Piedmont. He is said to have first learned the art of painting at Vercelli from Gerolamo Giovenone. He probably received his training at Varallo at the beginning of the 1490s, a lively period in the town’s artistic life, when extensive works were being carried out at the Sacro Monte. His master was Giovanni Stefano Scotti, none of whose works has as yet been identified but who, judging from the early work of his pupil, may have been influenced by Lombard artists, most notably Bernardino Luini.[1]

Gaudenzio’s early works, such as a painting on panel of the Crucifixion (Varallo, Museo Civico Pietro Calderini), were influenced by the poetic art of Bramantino and by the northern Italian classicizing style of the Milanese painter Bernardo Zenale. His early, but self-assured, Angel of the Annunciation (c. 1500; Vercelli, Museo Civico Borgogna), painted for the convent of the Grazie, Vercelli, suggests that these sources were soon enriched by his response to the tender Renaissance style of Pietro Perugino (active at the Certosa di Pavia, 1496–9).

Gaudenzio is also recorded at Vercelli in the first known documentary reference to him, the contract for a polyptych commissioned by the Confraternity of St. Anna in 1508, with Eusebio Ferrari acting as guarantor. There remain four paintings of scenes from the Life of St. Anne and God the Father (Turin, Galleria Sabauda) and two of the Annunciation (London, National Gallery). In these works Gaudenzio’s style is more controlled, possibly as a result of a journey to Central Italy in c. 1505. In 1513 Gaudenzio painted a cycle of frescoes showing scenes from the Passion on the dividing wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Varallo. Giovanni Martino Spanzotti had painted a similar cycle in Santa Bernardino, Ivrea, a century earlier. The frescoes are rich in strikingly realistic detail and convey emotion with passionate intensity; here Gaudenzio created new forms to express human emotions and attitudes.

Gaudenzio's initial pictorial style may be considered as derived mainly from the old Milanese school, which had imbibed the classic influence of Leonardo and pupils such as Bramantino. However, the provincial impetus was also strong, as is demonstrated in his emotive work at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.

Mature work

In the second decade of the 16th century Gaudenzio painted a series of great polyptychs in the area around Novara. A polyptych at Arona, Piedmont shows, in the upper register, God Blessing St. Ambrose, St. Felinus, St. Jerome and St. Gratianus and, in the lower, the Nativity with St. Catherine, St. Barbara, St. Gaudentius and St. Peter Martyr, with Christ and the Apostles on the predella (1511; Arona, Santa Maria). An altar (1514–21) in the Basilica of San Gaudenzio, shows a Nativity in the upper register with a divided Annunciation to either side of it and a Virgin and Child with Saints below, flanked by St. Peter, St. John the Baptist, St. Agabus and St. Paul. The predella is devoted to Legends of St. Gaudentius. In the second altar Gaudenzio conveys emotion with ease and grace, predominantly through rich and emotionally expressive colour. In 1514-1516 he contributed to the Ancona dell'Assunta.

It is harder to trace Gaudenzio’s career over the next decade. He returned to work in the chapels of the Sacro Monte di Varallo by 1524. The chapels are dispersed over a hilltop sanctuary, connected by a winding path, and containing a combination of diorama and wax museum[2] with life-size terracotta figures.[3] He executed his most memorable work, a fresco of the Crucifixion (pictured right), with a multitude of figures, no less than twenty-six of them being modelled in actual relief, and coloured. He combined painting with life-size statues of polychrome terracotta and created a radically new rendering of scenes from the Passion. The sculptures, which are startlingly realistic, are arranged as though on a stage and blend with illusionistic and dramatically expressive frescoes.

At the same time Gaudenzio started painting and gilding the great wooden altarpiece created by Giovanni Angelo Del Maino for the sanctuary of the Assumption at Morbegno, with scenes from the Life of the Virgin and Christ. The beautiful polyptych of the Holy Sacrament (Isola Bella, Museo Borromeo) must have been painted by 1531. Gaudenzio’s work was done over a wide geographical area, but it was at Vercelli that he achieved his greatest success. Between 1529 and 1532 he painted an altar, the Virgin of the Oranges, and frescoed scenes from the Life of Mary Magdalene, a Crucifixion and scenes from the Life of the Virgin in the church of San Cristoforo, Vercelli. The powerful Crucifixion, or the harmonious and spirited Assumption of the Virgin, demonstrate Gaudenzio’s high level of achievement in portraying sacred subjects. The psychological power of the protagonists is remarkable, as successful here as in his smaller paintings.

Later career

At this point Gaudenzio began working more regularly in Lombardy, starting with his ethereal, visionary frescoes of Angel Musicians (1534–6) for the dome of the sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie at Saronno, where he succeeded the recently deceased Bernardino Luini. The contract was drawn up in Milan, where Gaudenzio lived from 1539 until his death and where he opened a workshop that carried out the city’s main private commissions. In the frescoes at Saronno, and in his later work in Milan, Gaudenzio’s art took a new direction; he placed greater emphasis on a more theatrical language of gesture and expression, and he drew closer to the prevailing style of Milanese Mannerism. This emphasis on drama is developed in works such as the Martyrdom of St. Catherine (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera) and the frescoes for Santa Maria della Pace, now transferred on to canvas, depicting scenes from the Life of St. Anne and scenes from the Life of the Virgin (1545; Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera), which are among the most impressive works of his final years.

Gaudenzio was an influential artist and a series of cartoons (Turin, Accademia) suggests the existence of a school of artists who kept his style alive throughout the rest of the century. Ferrari was a very prolific painter, distinguished by strong animation. In general character, his work suggests more of the 15th than the 16th century. His subjects were always religious. Andrea Solari, Giovan Battista della Cerva, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, and Fermo Stella were his principle students.

Selected works

  • Sant'Anna Altarpiece (Galleria Sabauda and National Gallery, London)
  • Pietà, in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin
  • St Catharine Miraculously Saved from the Torture of the Wheel, Brera Gallery, Milan
  • Frescoes in church of Santa Maria della Pace, Milan
  • Virgin with Angels and Saints under an Orange Tree, Vercelli Cathedral
  • Last Supper, Refectory of San Paolo
  • Birth of the Virgin, Annunciation, Visitation, Adoration of the Shepherds and Kings, Crucifixion, Assumption of the Virgin (1532–1535), Church of San Cristoforo
  • St. Paul Meditating, Louvre, Paris
  • Presentation in the Temple, Christ among the Doctors, History of Christ (1507), Convent of the Minorites, Varallo
  • Adoration (after 1527), Santa Maria di Loreto, near Varallo
  • Glory of Angels (1535), Dome of the Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Saronno
  • Scourging of Christ, Ecce Homo and Crucifixion (1542), Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
  • Saint Andrew, London, National Gallery
  • Christ rising from the Tomb, London, National Gallery
  • Lamentation of Christ, c. 1527–1529, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
  • St. Cecile with the Donator and St. Marguerite, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
  • Beheading of a saint, c. 1540, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Gaudenzio Ferrari — An Italian painter and the greatest master of the Piedmontese School, b. at Valduggia, near Novara. Italy, c. 1470: d. at Milan, 31 January, 1546. His work is vast but poorly known. He seems never to have left his beloved Piedmont or Lombardy save perhaps on one occasion. He had seen Leonardo at work in Milan (1490-98), and learned from him lessons in expression and in modeling. But he owed more to his compatriots in the North: to Bramante and Bramantino in architectural details, above all to Mantegna, whose frescoes of the "Life of St. James" inspired more than one paintings at Varallo.

Nothing is more uncertain than the history of this great man. His earliest known works belong to the years 1508 and 1511; at that time he was about forty years of age. He would seem to have been formed in the good old Milanese school of such men as Borgognone, Zenale, and Butinone, which kept aloof from the brilliant fashion in art favoured by the court of the Sforzas, and which prolonged the fifteenth century with its archaisms of expression. Gaudenzio, this youngest and frankest of this group, never fell under the influence of Leonardo, and hence it is that on one point he always held out against the new spirit; he would never daily with the paganism or rationalism of Renaissance art. He was as passionately naturalistic as any painter of his time, before all else, however, he was a Christian artist. He is the only truly religious master of the Italian Renaissance, and this trait it is which makes him stand out in any age where faith and single-mindedness were gradually disappearing, as a man of another country, almost of another time.

When we consider the works of Gaudenzio, more especially his earlier ones, in the light of the fact that the district in which he was born was in the direct line of communication between North and South; and reflect that what might be termed the "art traffic" between Germany and Italy was very great in his time, we are forced to recognize that German influence played a considerable part in the development of his genius, in so far at least as his mind was amenable to external stimuli. He is, in fact, the most German of the Italian painters. In the heart of a school where art was becoming more and more aristocratic, he remained the people's painter. In this respect his personality stands out so boldly amongst the Itatian painters of the time that it seems natural to infer that Gaudenzio in his youth travelled to the banks of the Rhine, and bathed long and deep in its mystic atmosphere.

Like the Gothic masters, he is perhaps the only sixteenth-century painter who worked exclusively for churches or convents. He is the only one in Italy who painted lengthy sacred dramas and legends from the lives of the saints: a "Passion" at Varallo; a "Life of the Virgin", and a "Life of St. Magdalen", at Vercelli; and at times, after the fashion of the cinquecento, he grouped many different episodes in one scene, at the expense of unity in composition, till they resembled the mysteries, and might be styled "sectional paintings". He was not aiming at art, but at edification. Hence arose a certain negligence of form and a carelessness of execution still more pronounced. The "Carrying of the Cross" at Cannobio, the "Calvary" at Vercelli, the "Deposition" at Turin, works of great power in many ways, and unequalled at the time in Italy for pathos and feeling, are somehow wanting in proportion, and give one the impression that the conventional grouping has been departed from. The soul, being filled as it were with its object, as overpowered by the emotions; and the intellect confesses its inability to synthesize the images which rise tumultuously from an over excited sensibility. Another consequence of this peculiarity of mental conformation is, perhaps, the abuse of the materials at his disposal Gaudenzio never refrained from using doubtful methods, such as ornaments in relief, the use of gilded stucco worked into harness, armour, into the aureolas, etc. And to heighten the effect he does not even hesitate to make certain figures stand out in real, palpable relief; is fact some of his frescoes are as much sculpture as they are painting, by reason of this practice.

His history must always remain incomplete until we get further enlightenment concerning that strange movement of the Pietist preachers, which ended in establishing (1487-93) a great Franciscan centre on the Sacro Monte de Varallo. It was in this retreat that Gaudenzio spent the years which saw his genius come to full maturity; it was there he left his greatest works, his "Life of Christ" of 1513, in twenty-one frescoes at Santa Maria delle Grazie, and other works on the Sacro Monte dating between 1523 and 1528. It was there that the combined use of painting and sculpture produced a most curious result. Fresco is only used as an ornament, a sort of background to a scene presenting a tableau vivant of figures in terra-cotta. Some of the groups embrace no less than thirty figures. Forty chapels bring out in this way the principal scenes in the drama of the Incarnation, Gaudenzio is responsible for the chapels of the Magi, the Pietà, and the Calvary.

In his subsequent works, at Vercelli (1530-34) and at Saronno (in the cupola of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, 1535), the influence of Correggio is furiously blended with the above-mentioned German leanings. The freshness and vigour of his inspiration remain untouched in all their homely yet stern grace. The "Assumption" at Vercelli is perhaps the greatest lyric in Italian art; this lyric quality in his painting is still more intense in the wonderful "Glory of Angels", in the cupola at Saronno, the most enthusiastic and jubilant symphony that any art has ever produced. In all Correggio's art there is nothing more charming than the exquisite sentiment and tender rusticity of "The Flight into Egypt", in the cathedral of Como. The artist's latest works were those he executed at Milan, whither he retired in 1536. In these paintings, the creations of a man already seventy years of age, the vehemence of feeling sometimes becomes almost savage, the presentation of his ideas abrupt and apocalyptic. His method becomes colossal and more and more careless, but still in the "Passion" at Santa Maria delle Grazie (1542) we cannot fail to trace the hand of a master.

Gaudenzio was married at least twice. By his first marriage a son was born to him in 1509 and a daughter in 1512. He married, in 1528, Maria Mattia della Foppa who died about 1540, shortly after the death of his son. These sorrows doubtless affected the character of his later works. Gaudenzio's immediate influence was scarcely appreciable. His pupils Lanino and Della Cerva are extremely mediocre. Nevertheless when the day of Venice's triumph came with Tintoretto, and Bologna's with the Carraccis in the counter-reform movement, it was the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari that triumphed in them. The blend of Northern and Latin genius in his work, so characteristic of the artists of the Po valley, was carried into the ateliers of Bologna by Dionysius Calvaert. It became the fashion, displacing, as it was bound to do, the intellectual barrenness and artistic exoticism of the Florentine School.

References

  1. Back to citation Luisa Arrigoni; Emanuela Daffra; Pietro C. Marani, eds. (1998). Pinacoteca di Brera: guida ufficiale. Milan: Touring Editore. p. 147.
  2. Back to citation Freedberg 1993, p. 393.
  3. Back to citation Abbaye de Saint Michel ou Sacra di San Michele, Sacro Monte de Varallo dans le Piémont italien Archived 2006-03-28 at the Wayback Machine

Bibliography

  • Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). Painting in Italy, 1500–1600. Pelican History of Art. Penguin Books Ltd. pp. 392–397.
  • Carlone, Mariagrazia (1999). "Gaudenzio Ferrari and the Musical Statues in Varallo". Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography. 24 (1–2): 89–100. ISSN 1522-7464.
  • Tononi, Fabio, “Intermediality and Immersion in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Adoration of the Magi in Chapel V of the Sacred Mountain of Varallo”, PsicoArt: Rivista di Arte e Psicologia, Vol. 10 (2020), pp. 1–18.
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