Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
painter of the High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
from Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
, who worked in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
. Boltraffio and Bernardino Luini
Bernardino Luini
Bernardino Luini was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described to have taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently many of his works were...
are the strongest artistic personalities to emerge from Leonardo's studio. According to Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...
, he was of an aristocratic family and was born in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
.
His major painting of the 1490s is the Resurrection (painted with fellow da Vinci pupil Marco d'Oggiono
Marco d'Oggiono
Marco d'Oggiono was an Italian Renaissance painter and a chief pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, many of whose works he copied.-Biography and works:...
and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). A Madonna and Child in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli
Museo Poldi Pezzoli
The Museo Poldi Pezzoli is an art museum in Milan, Italy.The museum was originated in the 19th century as private collection of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and his mother, Rosa Trivulzio, of the family of the condottiero Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, and has a particularly broad collection of Northern...
of Milan, is one of the high points of the Lombard Quattrocento
Quattrocento
The cultural and artistic events of 15th century Italy are collectively referred to as the Quattrocento...
.
His portraits, often in profile, and his half-length renderings of the Madonna and Child are Leonardesque in conception, though the clean hard edges of his outlines lack Leonardo's sfumato
Sfumato
Sfumato is one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance .The most prominent practitioner of sfumato was Leonardo da Vinci, and his famous painting of the Mona Lisa exhibits the technique. Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or...
.
In Bologna
Bologna
Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...
, where he remained in 1500-1502, he found sympathetic patrons in the Casio family, of whom he painted several portraits and for whom he produced his masterwork, the Pala Casio for the Church of the Misericordia (Louvre Museum); it depicts a Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian and two Kneeling Donors
Donor portrait
A donor portrait or votive portrait is a portrait in a larger painting or other work showing the person who commissioned and paid for the image, or a member of his, or her, family...
, Giacomo Marchione de' Pandolfi da Casio and his son, the Bolognese poet Girolamo Casio, who mentioned Boltraffio in some of his sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s. Boltraffio's portrait of Girolamo Casio is at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
Formerly assigned to the Louvre's Master of the Vierge aux Balances, the handsome Portrait of a Young Woman with a Scorpion Chain now in the Samuel H. Kress Collection of the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC has been reattributed to the hand of Boltraffio and dated to the period 1490-1505. Whether or not Leonardo participated in its design remains uncertain.
The standard monograph is Maria Teresa Fiorio, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio: Un pittore milanese nel lume di Leonardo. (Milan and Rome) 2000.
Selected works with disputed attribution
- Portrait of a Young Woman with a Scorpion Chain, Columbia Museum of ArtColumbia Museum of ArtThe Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina has a collection of European and American fine and decorative art that spans several centuries...
, previously given to the Master of the Vierge aux Balances. - Madonna LittaMadonna LittaThe Madonna Litta is a late 15th-century painting of the Madonna and Christ Child generally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and displayed in the Hermitage Museum, Russia....
, (Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, sometimes attributed to Marco d´Oggiono). - Holy family, (National Gallery in PragueNational Gallery in PragueThe National Gallery in Prague is a state-owned art gallery in Prague, Czech Republic. It is housed in different locations within the city, the largest being the Veletržní Palác....
, probably a copy after the unknown original). - Virgin and child with donor, (Rome, Sant´Onofrio, Museo del Tasso, sometimes attributed to Cesare da SestoCesare da Sestothumb|220px|Statue of Cesare da Sesto.thumb|220px|Salome, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Cesare da Sesto was an Italian painter of the Renaissance active in Milan and elsewhere in Italy....
). - (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) Portrait of a Man, probably by Ambrogio de Predis.