MAZZOLINO, LODOVICO. - Painter, b. in Ferrara ca. 1480, d. there between 27 Sept. 1528 and 22 Dec. 1530. He was chiefly influenced by L. Costa, but in his chromatic preferences he approaches Dosso Dossi and Garofalo, and in the typologies and the feigned architectures of his sacred paintings he shows the influence of contemporary German and Flemish artists.
He worked without interruption in Ferrara, for the Este court, from 1504 to 1524, and then moved, for about two years, to Bologna, where he painted for the church of S. Francesco a Jesus among the Doctors, now divided between the Berlin Museum and the Pinacoteca of Bologna, and a Christ among the Money-Changers, now in the Wielkopolskie Museum in Poznań. Numerous works of his are found scattered in the galleries of Rome, Florence, Turin, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Vienna, London, Dublin, Cambridge, Philadelphia, etc. M.'s art represents a pleasing provincial phenomenon of storytelling, half rustic, half grotesque and half fable-like, on the margins of the poetic realism of the early sixteenth century in Ferrara. Compared with those of the Parmesan miniaturist Marmitta, his qualities, clearly recognizable, are best condensed in his preferred subjects, and in small dimensions, of the Holy Family, the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Christ in the Temple, etc. But even in a large and demanding panel such as the Nativity with Sts. Alberico and Benedict, in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, M. stands out for the sharpness of his strongly characterized male and adolescent typologies, for the sweetness of the Virgin, with an almost Leonardesque profile, for the splendor of his enamels and for the mysterious, calm sweetness of the lake landscape in the background. Other admirable productions of his are, in Rome, in the Galleria Borghese, the orientalizing small picture of the Nativity, with its splendid vermilions and ochre yellows, and, in the Galleria Doria, the pathetic Pietà with its mountainous, wooded background and the highly intricate Massacre of the Innocents (in the upper right corner, a Rest on the Flight into Egypt of rare idyllic refinement), which alternates chromatic harshness and frenzied gestures with exquisite alabaster-like ornamentation, of pure Po Valley aestheticism.
Bibliography5 works
Alberto Neppi