BATTAGIO (BATTACCHIO), GIOVANNI. — Architect; in 1465–66 he was working to restore the hospital in Lodi, his native city; in 1481 he was in the service of the Duke of Milan; in 1484 he took on, with Agostino de’ Fonduti, the commission for the façade of the Palazzo Landi in Piacenza; in 1488 he drew up the contract for the construction of the Incoronata in Lodi; in 1490 he participated in the competition for the tiburium of Milan Cathedral, which was awarded to Amadeo; in 1490 he designed Santa Maria della Croce in Crema, on which he worked until 1493.
The octagonal-plan Incoronata in Lodi derives from the sacristy of Bramante’s Santa Satiro in Milan: in it Battagio, instead of semicircular niches, employs trapezoidal niches with a perspectival entablature to increase the illusion of space. Although Battagio ceased to oversee the works from 1489 and the building was completed only at the beginning of the sixteenth century, his design was not altered, as shown by the organic unity maintained both inside and out, with the characteristically Lombard form of the eight-lobed dome covered by the tiburium.
Santa Maria della Croce in Crema has a central plan animated by four niches opening onto its perimeter with projecting chapels covered by domes, arranged so as to form a Greek cross in which the central rotunda is inscribed. Inside, the use of columns projecting from the walls instead of piers gives movement to the building.
The exterior (in which the terminal loggia is by Giovanni Antonio Montanaro, who completed the church in 1500) belongs to a cylindrical mass, surrounded by a cladding entirely of tracery, enlivened by the vivid chromaticism of the terracotta decoration.
With Battagio, Bramantesque forms, in keeping with the tendencies of Lombardy, bend toward a predominantly chromatic vision.
Battagio was also a modeler of terracottas; to him may be attributed the busts within roundels inside the Incoronata and two others on the doors of Santa Maria della Croce.