Barnaba da Modena

BARNABA DA MODENA. - A Modenese painter active in the second half of the fourteenth century. He is first recorded in 1364, when he decorated the Ducal Palace of Genoa. He had by then already been in Liguria for some years, and it is to be supposed that he was not very young, given the importance of the work. In 1367 he signed the Madonna, executed likewise in Genoa, now at the Städel Institute in Frankfurt. Another Madonna, now in Berlin, is dated 1369. From Liguria he moved on to Piedmont: of a stay of his in that region the works he left at Rivoli and at Alba in the church of St. John the Baptist remain as evidence, executed roughly between 1370 and about 1377. In 1380 he was summoned to Pisa to finish the frescoes with the Life of St. Ranieri in the Camposanto. Before going to Pisa he stopped, as a document shows, at Modena. He remained in Tuscany only a short time and returned to Genoa, where he is documented in 1383: this is the last certain date that records him. Many of his works are found in the galleries of Piedmont and Liguria, in foreign museums and in private collections. Among the latter let us recall the Madonna of the Schiff Giorgini collection in Rome, signed Barnabas de Mutina pinxii, to be placed at approximately around 1367 and which reveals its most legitimate affinities with the Madonna of Berlin and with that of St. Matthew at Tortona.

The great majority of B.'s paintings that have come down to us reproduce an archaizing motif of the Madonna and Child. They are grave images in solemnly architectonic forms with antiquated mannerisms in the arrangement of the garments, all threaded with gold. They have round faces painted in very smooth and bright tones; but in the shaded passages of sfumato the somewhat muted and, as it were, burnished colors of the Madonnieri, heirs of late Byzantinism, return. Despite the apparent monotony of the schemes, however, the Modenese master is not lacking in highly pictorial qualities. B. also painted some small panels, such as the one with the Ascension attributed to him by Venturi, formerly in the Sterbini collection in Rome, and another with the Pentecost in the National Gallery of London, likewise conceived in the old manner, with the figures arranged in symmetry.

Giuliano Briganti