Also known as:
Italian: Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio
BOLTRAFFIO, GIOVANNI ANTONIO - Madonna and Child, Milan, Poldi Pezzoli gallery.
BOLTRAFFIO, GIOVANNI ANTONIO. - Painter, b. in Milan in 1467, d. there in 1516. He worked almost always in his native city; only in 1500 do we find him in Bologna, where he enjoyed the protection of the Casio family, for which he executed numerous portraits, and around 1515 in Rome, where an fresco in the cloister of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum is attributed to him.
Far more than from the Lombard tradition of Foppa and Zenale, recognizable moreover in the predella for the rectangular scheme of the composition (Madonna in the National Gallery, London), he underwent the influence of Leonardo, whose faithful disciple he became; although he did not succeed in assimilating the achievements of the master's art, he imitated his types and gestures (Madonna and Child in the National Museum, Budapest; Madonna and Child in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan) and his landscape backgrounds (Two Devotees in the Brera Gallery, "Ancona di Lodi" now in the National Museum, Budapest); seeking to reproduce Leonardo's "sfumato" and softness, he rather immersed the forms of his smooth and somewhat swollen figures in a dark chiaroscuro. He favored half-length compositions; but in a second period he sought a certain monumentality of design, visible above all in the Madonna Casio executed in 1500 for the Church of the Misericordia in Bologna (now in the Louvre), which has been considered, already since Vasari, his masterpiece.
Bibliography5 worksG. Pauli, s. v. in Thieme-Becker, IV, pp. 256-57; W. Suida, Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich 1929, p. 186 add.; id., Das leonardesche Jünglin
BIBL.: G. Pauli, s. v. in Thieme-Becker, IV, pp. 256-57; W. Suida, Leonardo und sein Kreis, Munich 1929, p. 186 add.; id., Das leonardesche Jünglingbildnis, in Pantheon, 6 (1930), pp. 564-67; A. De Hevesy, B., ibid., 18 (1936), pp. 323-29; A. Venturi, Leonardo e la sua scuola, Novara 1941, pp. 29-30.
Prandi, Marta. “Boltraffio, giovanni antonio.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, coll. 1819–1820. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949. https://azioneromana.com/article/boltraffio-giovanni-antonio.
MLA
Prandi, Marta. “Boltraffio, giovanni antonio.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949, coll. 1819–1820. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/boltraffio-giovanni-antonio.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec2_boltraffio_giovanni_antonio,
author = {Prandi, Marta},
title = {Boltraffio, giovanni antonio},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {II},
pages = {1819--1820},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1949},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/boltraffio-giovanni-antonio}
}
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