Milan 1495 - 1521
Mannerism
Italy: Lombardy
250,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
Giampietrino is recorded in Leonardo’s studio in the late 1490s and worked in Lombardy all his life. Giampietrino produced both semi-erotic female nudes masquerading as classical heroines and intensely religiose devotional works from small, domestic panels to large, multifigural altarpieces. He was not ‘scientific’ in the way his master was and his chief characteristic is a soft, direct soulfulness.
While it is hard to provide a firm chronology for Giampietrino’s work, among his early works are a series of small full-length female nudes, anong them a Leda (Staatliche Museen, Kassel), a Diana (Metropolitan Museum, New York) and a Venus and Cupid (Private collection, Milan). The flesh tones are pale, enlivened with pink highlights and the modeling is achieved with an understated sfumato.
More obviously indebted to Leonardo are the small paintings of the Madonna and Child, of which an exquisite example is the Madonna with the Cherries (ex Rob Smeets collection, Milan) and a slightly later Madonna with the Apple (Brera, Milan) which exists in numerous versions. Giampietrino looks not only at Leonardo but his own contemporaries, notably Andrea Solario (1460-1524) and Bernadino Luini (1482-1532). Solario’s influence is especially noticeable in his highly colored depictions of femmes fatales such as the Salome (Private collection, London) while Luini’s palette, with its dominant greens and reds, and the seraphic sweetness of expression are evident in works like the large Madonna and Child enthroned with Saints (Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Milan).
In addition to his depictions of the Holy Family, Giampietrino supplied a demand for single-figured portrayals of the suffering Christ: subjects such as Christ Carrying the Cross (National Gallery, London), Ecce Homo and Christ Crowned with Thorns. In them, Christ’s pale figure is usually set against a dark background and enfolded in dramatic red drapery. The intense religiosity of these images parallels the production of similar subjects by Giampietrino’s Spanish contemporary, Luis Morales.
Selected artworks
Top 3 auction prices
2023
2023
2024
Details
Related exhibition
Notable exhibitions
Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Sotto il segno di Leonardo, 15 May 2015 – 28 September 2015. Curated by Federica Manoli and Ludovica Landoni.
Pavia, Castella Visconteo, Leonardeschi : da Foppa a Giampietrino ; dipinti dall’Ermitage di San Pietroburgo e dei Musei Civici di Pavia, 12 March – 10 July 2011. Curated by Tatiana Kustodieva and Susanna Zatti.
Cremona, Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, 14 February – 2 May 2004; travelled to New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 May – 15 August 2004. Curated by Andrea Bayer, Mina Gregori and Ivana Iotta.
Books on Giampietrino
Pietro C. Marani, ‘Giovan Pietro Rizzoli, called Giampietrino’ in The Legacy of Leonardo, 1998.
C. Geddo, “Le Pale d’altare di Giampietrino: ipotesi per un percorso stilistico”, Arte lombarda, 101,1992, pp. 67-82.
G.P. Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittura, Milan, 1954.