MAZZOLA BEDOLI, GIROLAMO. – Painter, born in Moile (now S. Lazzaro), in the province of Parma, around 1500, died there in 1569. From his early youth he had contacts with Parmigianino, which intensified after 1529, when he married one of his cousins, Caterina Elena Mazzola (after 1540 B. added to his original surname that of M.).
His first certain work, in which Mannerist influences drawn from Parmigianino are evident alongside original touches, is the Concessione di Maria (1533) in the Parma Gallery, followed by the two Annunciations in the Pinacothecas of Naples and the Ambrosiana (Milan), the S. Tecla of the cathedral of Mantua, and the S. Chiara of the Pinacotheca of Naples. After 1535, M. B. executed the altarpiece of S. Niccolò for the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, the Sposalizio di S. Caterina (Pinacotheca of Parma), and other works now in Munich, Budapest, etc. Around 1540 he painted the altarpiece of S. Alessandro and two organ shutters at the Stoccata in Parma. Subsequently the artist turned towards Correggio, as is shown by the polyptych, formerly in the convent of S. Martino dei Bocci and now in the Parma Gallery, the vault of the central nave in the Cathedral, with the apse of the presbytery, the barrel vaults to the north and south in the Stoccata, with the related apse conches. In M. B.’s production the over-elaborate superfluities of 16th-century Mannerism are all too apparent, becoming in certain respects almost a caricature of the mannerisms and bombast of Parmigianino. Moreover, he rarely succeeds in organizing the various constituent elements of his composite style into a persuasive unified vision. Yet, in the discontinuous course of this decadent art, there are moments of authentic inspiration, sustained by singular formal, chromatic and luminous values. It will suffice to mention the new spatial devices, the opalescent transparencies, the tonal contrasts and the upright, flowing figure of the Virgin in the Concessione, the most noble angel hovering in the air and the putto seen from the back, backlit, in the Annunciata of the Naples Museum, the background of the wooded landscape and the affectionate gesture of the Virgin in the Madonna col Bambino, and above all the Summa summarum quae Silvestrina dicitur (Rome 1516), which had about 50 editions.