GALASSO. - Under the name of G. di Matteo Piva there has been taking shape, in recent decades, the figure of a fifteenth-century Ferrarese painter, who has taken the place of the very uncertain G. Galassi, cited by the old biographers. Supposed pupil of Piero della Francesca and in contact, at Ferrara, around 1450, with the Fleming Rogier van der Weyden, the Piva, after having worked with other Este colorists in the villas of Belriguardo, Migliaro and Belfiore, he would have moved to Bologna, where he would have executed important works in the churches of St. Dominic, of St. John in Monte and of Mezzaratta. His death, according to the chronicler Lamo, would have occurred there in 1488.
To him A. Venturi attributed a group of three paintings, indisputably by the same hand and which more than any other work of the Ferrarese school attest the beneficial influence of Piero on those masters: these works are two gentle Musician Muses, in the Museum of Budapest, and the very famous Allegory of Autumn, in the Museum of Berlin, which for the solidity of its compositional structure, for the spontaneous vital energy that animates the protagonist, for the admirable synthesis of the landscape, for the freshness of the flesh-toned, blue, olive-green and peacock-blue hues, is one of the most memorable georgic representations, in the Renaissance, and not only Italian.
Bibliography3 works
| Alberto Nepoi