Coppo di Marcovaldo

COPPO di MARCOVALDO. - Florentine painter. Taken prisoner by the Sienese during the battle of Montaperti (1260), he painted, to ransom himself from captivity, the Madonna del Bordone for the Church of the Servi in Siena (1261). On 22 July 1265 the Opera di S. Jacopo of Pistoia paid C. for the frescoing of a wall of the chapel of S. Jacopo in the Cathedral and for the gilding of the panels of a "testavangelo" worked by Pace di Valentino, a Sienese goldsmith. Although the frescoes of S. Jacopo and other works have been destroyed, with the exception of the Crucifix painted ca. 1275, now preserved in the sacristy of the Cathedral, and which the most recent criticism tends to assign entirely to his son Salerno, there are unanimously attributed to C. the great Cross painted with Stories of the Passion in the museum of S. Gimignano, for which a dating around 1250 is proposed, and a panel with the Madonna and Child in the church of the Servi in Orvieto, which would follow the Madonna del Bordone. A robust plasticity obtained by means of dense smoky shadows that incisively underscore the abstract formal ciphers and the graphic mannerisms of the Byzantine tradition, conferring on them an expressive and dramatic intensity that is entirely new, characterizes the style of this great master and makes him the most significant and lofty Florentine precursor of the painting of Cimabue.

Enzo Carli