Mauro Pavesi

The fresco in the chapel of Saints Peter and Paul, in the church of the former female monastery of Meda, embodies style traits of the middle XVI century Cremonese art and of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone’s manner...

The Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan houses an important fresco cycle in the Marliani family chapel, which was previously ascribed to artists such as Ottavio Semino, Aurelio Luini and Francesco Nappi. Now that a set of newly rediscovered mural paintings in Selvanesco have been attributed to Giovanni Battista Della Rovere, called Fiammenghino (1561-1627), it is possible to recognize the same hand in the Santa Maria delle Grazie frescoes...

A rather neglected small panel with the Stigmata of St. Francis, previously attributed to Girolamo Muziano and his circle (or dubiously associated with Marcello Venusti), actually shows decisive formal similarities to Antonio Campi’s production. The piece is currently displayed in room XI in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (inv. 40370). Its intense pathetism and striking realism, very far from Muziano’s elegant mannerism, were probably the causes of its little appreciation among critics; if properly considered, these characters, together with the peculiar pre-Caravaggian side lighting, support the attribution to the painter from Cremona. Several stylistic elements allow us to situate it in the time-span between the Beheading of St. John the Baptist for San Paolo Converso in Milan (1571) and the Prayer in the Garden for Santa Maria della Noce in Inverigo (1577). Those were years of hectic activity for the artist, who was well integrated in the local milieu of religious and secular patrons, and engaged in a fruitful confrontation with the Leonardesque tradition, as demonstrated by the formal reference to Cesare da Sesto’s Salome in the altarpiece with the Beheading of St. John the Baptist in San Sigismondo in Cremona.

A Newly Discovered St. John the Baptist in the Desert from the Caravaggesque period of Giuseppe Vermiglio MAURO PAVESI The surveys for the cataloguing of the works of Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana brought to the discovery, among the most recent acquisitions, of a previously unknown St. John the Baptist by Giuseppe Vermiglio, which presents the same relaxed, calm pose of the painting of the same subject made by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and now part of the collection of Musei Capitolini in Rome. The artwork, never mentioned in the specific literature, came through a donation to its present location in 2007, with the attribution to an anonymous 17th- Century Emilian painter; a number of glaring stylistic and structural similarities undoubtedly confirm the attribution to Vermiglio. The derivation from that specific Caravaggio original, painted in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei – and also known through a replica documented in the Pamphili collection since the late 17th Century – adds a new piece to the reconstruction of the Roman acquaintances in the Lombard artist’s early career, after the notorious traces of his relationship with the Barberini and Giustiniani families, as demonstrated, respectively, by the many replicas Vermiglio had taken from Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac in the Barberini collection, and by the Coronation of Thorns at Palazzo Altieri, derived from another painting by Merisi, formerly part of the noteworthy collection of Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The possible date of Vermiglio’s newly discovered painting should not be extremely late, given the obvious derivation from Caravaggio, which suggests a not quite distant impression from the direct view of Merisi’s masterpieces; nonetheless, a clear classicist reduction of the model and the normalization of its iconography – typical elements of Vermiglio’s late Milanese works – seem to suggest a date near his return to Lombardy (documented since 1621).