Romanino, Girolamo di Romano, called Il

ROMANINO, GIROLAMO DI ROMANO, detto il. – Painter, born in Brescia between 1484 and 1487, died there ca. 1566.

His first dated work is the Deposition in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice (from the church of S. Lorenzo in Brescia), of 1510; in this work, and in the few paintings that may be considered close to it in date (the 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 already has vibrations of a distinctly 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 Museo di Padova), which demonstrates the extent to which the frescoes Tiziano had executed two years earlier for the Scuola del

Santo influenced him, and how, through his knowledge of Tiziano, he acquired compositional balance and learned to discipline, without diminishing it, his extraordinary chromatic splendor. The altarpiece of the church of S. Francesco in Brescia, and probably that of the Museo di Berlino, also belong to this period, the artist’s happiest. These works must have aroused great admiration in his homeland, since shortly afterward (between 1516 and 1518) Moretto, while painting the organ shutters for the old cathedral of Brescia, followed the manner of R. so closely that for a long time he was confused with him. But the restraint exercised by Tiziano disappears when the artist, called to Cremona in 1519 to paint the Storie della Passione in the cathedral, finds himself working near Pordenone. It is as though a gust of Baroque art crowds and disrupts 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 did R. recover the balance of his early works; instead, he crowded the spaces, concentrating the figures on a single plane. Yet the fluid, blended color, of unparalleled intensity and splendor, achieved expressions of passionate lyricism (Sposalizio della Vergine; S. Matteo). Reminiscences of Pordenone (Trittico della Galleria nazionale di Londra; S. Antonio in the cathedral of Salò, of 1529) and Savoldo (Cristo portacroce in the Galleria Martinengo in Brescia), as well as of Lotto (SS. Faustino e Giovita), alternate in the subsequent works, without the Titianesque inspiration ever being extinguished. In 1531 he worked for Cardinal Clesio in the Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, where he came into brief contact with the Dossi, and for a longer period with Fogolino, whose proximity rekindled his tendencies toward a northern expressionism; these tendencies also appear in the organ shutters for the new cathedral of Brescia, painted between 1539 and 1541. After this, no dated works by R. are known until 1557, when the artist, by then more than seventy years old, painted La predica del Battista for the church of S. Pietro in Modena, arranging the figures with an entirely unusual classicizing emphasis, perhaps attributable to the spreading influence of Giulio Romano.

Emma Zocca