BOCCATI, GIOVANNI DI PIERMATTEO, DETTO IL

Image from page 1004
Image from page 1004

BOCCATI, GIOVANNI di PIERMATTEO, known as il. – Painter, born in Camerino around 1420; in 1445 he moved to Perugia where he is last recorded in 1480. More than from the Marchigian milieu in which his early training took place (he may have been a pupil of L. Salimbeni the Younger), his style derived from examples by Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, and Piero della Francesca, from the latter of whom he borrowed—though in a superficial manner—the taste for vast perspectival backgrounds and the geometric rigor of compositions.

Boccati infused his paintings with a harmonious festivity of color, whose merit partly makes one forget the elementary nature of his compositions and figures. His principal works include the *Madonna of the Pergola* (1447, Galleria Nazionale, Perugia); the *Madonna of the Orchestra* (still extant) in the church of S. Eustachio in Belforte (1468); and the *Madonna and Saints* (1473) in Budapest.

See Plate CIII.

Bibl.: W. Bombe, s.V. in Thieme-Becker, IV, p. 153; A. Venturi, *Storia dell’arte*, VII, Milan 1911, pp. 517–162; Gnoli, *Pittori e miniatori dell’Umbria*, Spoleto 1923, pp. 161–162. For various attributions to Boccati cf.: L. Venturi, *La collezione Gualino*, Turin 1926, pl. 21, and B. Berenson, *Pitture italiane del Rinascimento*, Milan 1936, pp. 77–78. Elsa Gerini