LODOVICO MAZZOLINO. — Painter, born in Ferrara ca. 1480, died 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 false architectures of his sacred paintings he is indebted to contemporary Germans and Flemings.
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 by him are scattered through the galleries of Rome, Florence, Turin, Berlin, Munich, Paris, Vienna, London, Dublin, Cambridge, Philadelphia, etc. Mazzolino’s art represents a piquant provincial phenomenon of storytelling that is at once rustic, grotesque, and fairy-tale-like, on the margins of the poetic realism of early 16th-century Ferrara. Compared with those of the Parmesan miniaturist Marmitta, his qualities—easily recognizable—are best condensed in his preferred subjects, rendered in small scale, such as the *Holy Family*, the *Nativity*, the *Massacre of the Innocents*, *Christ in the Temple*, etc. Yet even in a large and ambitious panel like the *Nativity with SS. Alberico and Benedict*, in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, Mazzolino stands out for the clarity of his forceful types of men and adolescents, for the gentleness of the Virgin, whose profile is almost Leonardesque, for the brilliance of his enamels, and for the mysterious, serene sweetness of the lake landscape in the background. Other remarkable works of his are, in Rome, in the Borghese Gallery, the *Nativity* with its Orientalizing tones in vermilion and ochre hues, and, in the Doria Gallery,
and in the Adoration in the Pinacoteca of Munich, the sturdy *St. Clare*, of almost Cubist structure, with a magnetic gaze, who raises in her left hand the precious crystal reliquary, and the pensive portrait of the antiquary, with the hourglass on the table, in the Gallery of Parma.