ROMANINO, Girolamo di Romano, called Il. - Painter, b. in Brescia between 1484 and 1487, died there ca. 1566.
His first dated work is the Deposition of the Gallery of the Academy of Venice (from the church of S. Lorenzo in Brescia), of 1510; in this, and in the rare paintings that can be considered close to it in time (altarpiece of S. Rocco in Brescia), together with local characteristics and reminiscences of the Cremonese Boccaccino, the artist reveals a knowledge of Venetian art; but the color has vibrations of an already personal intensity. In 1513 in Padua he was commissioned by the monks of S. Giustina to paint the altarpiece for the high altar of their church (now in the Museum of Padua), which shows how much influence the frescoes that Titian had executed two years earlier for the Scuola del Santo had exercised on him and how from his knowledge of Titian he drew compositional balance and learned to discipline, without diminishing it, his extraordinary chromatic splendor. To this moment, the happiest of the artist, belong also the altarpiece of the church of S. Francesco in Brescia, and probably that of the Museum of Berlin. These works must have aroused great admiration in his homeland, if shortly afterward (between 1516 and 1518) Moretto, painting the organ shutters for the old Cathedral of Brescia, followed so closely the ways of the R. as to be for a long time confused with him. But the restraint exercised by Titian fails when the artist, summoned in 1519 to Cremona to paint the Stories of the Passion in the Cathedral, finds himself working near Pordenone. It is like a blast of baroqueism that crowds and convulses the compositions, in which a certain taste for the grotesque reveals northern influences.
Not even when, in 1521, he collaborated with the severe and composed Moretto in S. Giovanni Evangelista in Brescia does the R. recover the balance of his first works, and he crowds the spaces, packing the figures onto a single plane; but the color, fluid and fused, of unequaled intensity and splendor, reaches expressions of passionate lyricism (Marriage of the Virgin; St. Matthew). Reminiscences of Pordenone (Triptych of the National Gallery of London; St. Anthony in the cathedral of Salò, of 1529) and Savoldo (Christ Carrying the Cross of the Martinengo Gallery in Brescia) and also of Lotto (Sts. Faustino and Giovita) alternate in the subsequent works, without the Titianesque inspiration ever being extinguished. In 1531 he works for Card. Clesio in the Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trent, where he comes into contact for a short time with the Dosso, and for a longer time with Fogolino, whose proximity rekindles his tendencies toward a northern expressionism, which appear also in the organ shutters for the new cathedral of Brescia, painted between 1539 and 1541. After this no dated works of the R. are known until 1557, when the artist, by then more than seventy years old, paints for the church of S. Pietro in Modena The Preaching of the Baptist, composing the images in a classicizing emphasis altogether unusual, due perhaps to the spreading influence of Giulio Romano.