MELOZZO DA FORLÌ. - Painter, b. at Forlì on 8 June 1438, son of Giuliano di Melozzo degli Ambrogi, d. there on 8 Nov. 1494.
Around 1460 he is believed to have executed the fresco known as Il pestapepe, on the façade of a spice shop in the city, transferred to canvas in the last century and today visible in the picture gallery of Forlì. About six years later, M. must have been in Urbino, where he perfected himself under Piero della Francesca, especially with regard to the science of perspective, leaving there a static Christ Blessing, in tempera, today in that Gallery.
To roughly that period belong the two mutilated panels of the Uffizi in Florence, showing the Archangel Gabriel and the Annunciate, on one side, and Sts. Prosdocimus and John the Baptist, on the other. Around 1470 M. is in Rome and executes, besides a fresco with the Annunciation in the Pantheon, for the church of S. Marco the images of St. Mark the Evangelist and St. Mark the Pope. Of the greatest importance for the development of his art were, therefore, again in Rome, the fresco celebrating Sixtus IV and Platina (1475-77) preserved in the Vatican Picture Gallery, and the apse decoration of the church of the SS. Apostoli (1478-1480), detached in the 18th century and divided between the Quirinal staircase (Christ Blessing) and the Vatican Picture Gallery (two fragments of cherubim among the clouds, seven music-making angels and four heads of Apostles). A few years later, the master from Forlì executed, probably in Urbino, the small tempera portrait of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro as a youth, now in the Galleria Colonna in Rome, and around 1484 he began the fresco decoration of the sacristy of the Tesoro vecchio, in the Basilica della S. Casa at Loreto, with figures of cherubim, angels and prophets. To around 1490 belong the designs he supplied, in Rome, for the mosaics of the chapel of St. Helena, at S. Croce in Gerusalemme; in 1493, M. attends to ornamental works, now lost, in the Palazzo degli Anziani, at Ancona, and in the following year he executes his last known work, with the help of his pupils, namely the decoration of the vault in the Cappella Feo, at S. Biagio in Forlì. The great Romagnol master not only established a flourishing school in his own land, with Marco Palmezzano at its head, but remains a cultivated and at the same time daring representative of figurative humanism in the period of transition from 15th-century perspectival research to the classical ideals of the golden century, with all the intrinsic contributions of a wholesome energy and rural candor, in the figures in motion, and the glowing and saturated colors of the faces, the wings and the ornamental architectures. In stylistic and philological respects M. links, with his constant inclinations toward dynamic foreshortening in free atmosphere, the achievements of Piero and Mantegna to those of Correggio and of quadraturismo, on rigorously linear and geometric bases. But the artist's fame is entrusted principally, even more than to the scene depicting Sixtus IV and Platina, where some prerogatives of Raphael as a portraitist appear anticipated, to the luxuriant and chromatically vivid array of the music-making angels, formerly in the apse of the church of the SS. Apostoli, rich in every joyous loveliness, and to the winged and graceful figures of the adolescent angels, with the symbols of the Redemption, set on the segments of the vault at Loreto: progeny of utterly human creatures, and yet free of any profane dross, the only ones, perhaps, in the history of sacred art, that deserve to be placed ideally beside those of Fra Angelico. - See pl. XXXIX.
