Morazzone

Trained in Rome as a young artist, Morazzone is thought to have been taught by Cavaliere d’Arpino and is recorded as a student of the Sienese late mannerist painter Ventura Salimbeni (1568–1613). His tenebrist palette, enlivened by flashes of vivid, unearthly color, shows an awareness of Caravaggio, also of Lombard origins and associated with D’Arpino, although Morazzone’s paintings very much retained a mannerist flavor. By 1598, Morazzone returned to Varese from Rome, and soon established himself as an independent artist in Lombardy. He was working in Milan Cathedral by 1602, as well as painting Scenes from the life of St George for the Santuario in Rho. At this point, his style is a fusion of that of Cavaliere d’Arpino and of the much earlier local artist Gaudenzio Ferrari (1471–1546) who was responsible for many of the frescoes at the Sacro Monte at Varallo. Between 1605 and 1610 Morazzone worked on these aforementioned illusionistic frescoes but by 1610 he has developed his own artistic identity. The next decade saw his greatest works which pulsate with energy and complex rhythms of intertwined figures. Paintings such as Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1610, Museo Diocesano, Milan) and The Massacre of the Innocents (1612, Museo Diocesano, Milan) show Morazzone’s mastery of dynamic compositions, his interest in musculature, effects of light and shade and the faceted draperies whose unreal colors emerge from the surrounding shadows. During this decade, Morazzone collaborated with Cerano and Procaccini on several large-scale public projects, and in one case on a single gallery picture, the so-called ‘three-hand painting’ of ca. 1620 depicting the Martyrdom of Saints Rufina and Secunda (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). Morazzone was responsible for the figure of the agile executioner in the center of the work, ensuring the dynamism of the composition. Commissioned by the nobleman Scipione Toso, it showcases the thriving network of private patronage in Milan.

In his introduction to the 1962 Morazzone catalogue, Roberto Longhi memorably describes the remarkable variety of Morazzone’s work in the decade between 1610–20. Longhi uses the vocabulary of dance, writing that Morazzone ‘waltzes’ through the mannerist arabesques of billowing draperies, ‘the angels tumbling as if on parachutes, the clouds like flying saucers, his fertile invention which oscillates between stage drama and ballet: the “tango” of Jacob with the Angel at the Arcivescovado in Milan, the “Aragonese jig” of the Magdalene among angels in Varese and the “twist” of the Visitation of Arona’. He says that Morazzone was the master of adapting his syntax to the various forms and demands of any situation. He is also, more perhaps than any of his peers in seicento Lombardy, an artist of considerable stylistic variety painting at times with emphatic bravura and energy and at others, in scenes such as the Birth of the Virgin (S. Maria di Loreto, Arona), with a profoundly contemplative minimalism. Between those extremes Morazzone paints more conventional devotional scenes, often nocturnes, such as the Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). His last work was the great cupola of the Piacenza cathedral, which he died unfinished and was completed by Guercino.

The appreciation of Milanese seicento art, and especially that of Morazzone was greatly enhanced by several important exhibitions and the catalogues which accompanied them. Unsurprisingly, it all started with Roberto Longhi who remembers bicycling as a boy around the areas where these artists had painted. He was a moving force in this critical reassessment beginning with his study of the Sacro Monte of Varallo in 1917. His star pupil, Mina Gregori, organized the landmark exhibition Il Morazzone in 1962 for which he wrote the introduction. Before that, in 1955, Girolamo Testori organized an important exhibition in Turin, Manierismo Piemontese e Lombardo del Seicento which examined these artists as a group for the first time. In 1974 Peter Cannon-Brooks mounted the legendary exhibition, Lombard Paintings c.1595–c.1630, The Age of Federico Borromeo at the Birmingham City Art Galleries which introduced Milanese baroque painting to an English audience. These exhibition catalogues remain essential works of reference for scholars in the field.

Morazzone’s best pupil was Francesco Cairo (1607–1665). Cairo’s beautiful cabinet pictures of morbid subjects, which sumptuously mix the dramatic, the macabre, and the ecstatic, were hugely popular with private collectors. Yet they nevertheless mark the end of the brilliant originality and passionate feeling that distinguished early seventeenth-century Milanese painting. Cairo left Milan around 1629, likely because of the outbreak of the plague, and by 1633 was court painter to the Savoy at Turin. Morazzone’s influence is also felt on the eccentric Genoese artist, Alessandro Magnasco, who trained in Milan.