Ortolano, Giovanni Battista Benvenuti, known as L'

ORTOLANO, Giovanni Battista Benvenuti, known as L'. - Painter, b. in Ferrara to Francesco di Benvenuto around 1485 (in 1512 he had passed the age of 25) and d. not before 1525. In his formation, purely Po Valley in character, various elements converged, which almost never found a perfect fusion, although in recent times modern criticism has been able to recognize in a certain group of works by the O. attributions of vigorous expressive individuality.

At first under the influence of Boccaccino (see the ingenuous Nativity from the Davis bequest in the Metropolitan Museum of New York), then of Roberti and of Lorenzo Costa (the lunette of the Pietà, with a unified sky background, greenish blue, in the Pinacoteca of Ferrara, and the altarpiece of the Presepe, in the Roman Galleria Doria, where the Glory of angels, above, is a reminiscence of Raphael's St. Cecilia), the Ferrarese master later approaches Mazzolino in the exultation of greens and vermilions (Christ and the Adulteress in the collection of Viscount Lee of Fareham at Richmond, Surrey), but in his mature period he alternates typological affinities with Garofalo and those with Dosso Dossi, whereby the attributions to these two masters of several works, now held to be certainly by the O., are in part justified. His art, between the aestheticizing purism of Garofalo and the romantic fervor of Dosso, introduces into the sixteenth-century Ferrarese school a vivid accent of rustic gravity and craftsmanlike affability, albeit in modes of a longed-for classicism, and he distinguishes himself from the other contemporary painters of the Po valley by the rounded solidity of his masses, intensely illuminated, by the unripe profiling of his contours and by the abundance of his enameled colorations (R. Longhi defined him: «classicist in intention, but naturalist in grain and temperament; one would almost be tempted to call him the Moretto of Ferrarese painting»). Among his most characteristic and elevated works are to be cited: the Nativity of the Louvre, with its most devout idyllic recollection; the calm, intimate Circumcision of the Patrizi collection, in Rome; the slender St. Sebastian and the almost Giambellino-like one; the most noble St. Nicholas of the Pinacoteca Capitolina; the Crucifixion of the Pinacoteca of Brera; the pathetic, majestic Deposition of the Galleria Borghese (a replica exists in the Museum of Naples), and above all the altarpiece with Sts. Sebastian, Roch and Demetrius, in the National Gallery of London, where the art of the O. acquires an epic pulse, making one dream of ancient and pious chivalric deeds amid the coppiced woods.

Alberto Neppi