GAROFALO, Benvenuto Tisi detto Il. - Painter, b. probably in Ferrara in 1481, d. there on 6 July 1559. He was called il G. from his father's native district in the Polesine. At first a pupil of Domenico Panetti of Ferrara, he was later with Boccaccino in Cremona; but for a not brief period he followed in the footsteps of Lorenzo Costa, as is attested, among other things, by the small youthful Presepe, exquisitely artless, in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara. He then came into direct contact with Giorgione, but he also underwent the influence of his fellow countryman Dosso Dossi and that of Raphael and of the Roman school in general, inserting into his figurative repertoire, spontaneously inclined to affable idyll and realistic notations, schemes of learned archaeology and academic frigidities, of which the Deposizione (1527) in the Pinacoteca of Brera is a typical testimony.
For several decades G. alternated happy moments with periods of stasis of pure convention, without further developments, to the point of appearing a provincial and retiring latecomer. He attained, however, a perspicuous degree of elegance and nobility of expression, of a sure science of composition and of an enameled palette.
In 1550 he became completely blind. G. left a large number of works, among which stand out the altarpieces of the Pinacoteca of Ferrara (the Madonnas known as delle Nubi [1514], del Pilastro and del Riposo, the Strage degli innocenti [1519], the Resurrezione di Lazzaro, the Adorazione dei Magi [1537]), the Mantegnesque ceilings in the Ferrarese palaces Costabili and del Seminario (1519), the imposing, almost Veronesian Madonna in trono [1533] of the Galleria Estense in Modena, the Sacre conversazioni of the Roman galleries Doria, Capitolina, Borghese and of the Museo civico of Padua, and a group of mythological subjects in the Gallery of Dresden, among which very notable, for its chaste and serene humanistic spirit, is the Trionfo di Bacco, painted in a late period.
Bibliography5 works
Alberto Neppi