SALIMBENI, LORENZO AND JACOPO. - Painters. The information about these two artists, born at Sanseverino (Marche) and active in the first half of the 15th century, is very scanty.
Lorenzo is the elder and in all likelihood the more accomplished of the two. His name appears for the first time in the triptych of the Pinacoteca of Sanseverino of 1400, in which he declares that he is 26 years old, so that his date of birth is fixed around 1374. His training is not clear. It is not possible to think of influences on the part of Gentile da Fabriano, whose education was, if anything, parallel, precisely for reasons of age; nor of Allegretto Nuzi who, although he may have exercised some ascendancy over him, cannot, for stylistic reasons, have determined the orientation toward the modes of International Gothic, which appear in Lorenzo well felt and thoroughly assimilated already from his first work, that is, the aforementioned triptych. So that one must agree with A. Venturi that L. arrived at these modes through the sight of illuminated codices coming from the north and, perhaps also, as a result of contacts with Venetian artists who are encountered quite frequently in the region, at the beginning of the 15th century. In the early years of the 1400s there stayed in the Marche, for example, Jacobello del Fiore, and there was in all probability also Zanino di Pietro. In 1404 L. executed frescoes in the church of the Misericordia at Sanseverino, where a figure of Christ, signed and dated, is visible in an under-arch; in 1407 a Crucifixion, in the sacristy of the church of S. Lorenzo in Doliolo.
In the Stories of St. John the Evangelist, frescoed in the old Cathedral of the city, the two brothers appear for the first time; and beside them an enigmatic master Oliviero. Certainly from this moment Lorenzo and Jacopo show clearly that they are oriented more toward the modes of International Gothic, with a marked tendency for narrative taste, which reappears in the decorations of the crypt of S. Lorenzo in Doliolo, where there shines forth, among others, a fragile and most elegant figure of St. Lucy.
The most representative pictorial cycle of the two brothers is without doubt the celebrated frescoes of the Oratory of S. Giovanni in Urbino, which bear their signature and the date 1416. The entire back wall contains a large Crucifixion, while on the right wall the Stories of the Baptist unfold in a series of panels, arranged in a double row. While the Crucifixion is marked by a dramatic quality of sometimes exasperated realism, on the side wall everything is calmed and becomes a pleasant and refined sequence of fantastic stories of the Baptist, in which, alongside the pleasing expressions of the naturalistic element and of anecdotal detail, proper to International Gothic, there intervenes a tendency toward a decoration as refined as could be, carried out with subdued colors, of a rare preciousness. So great is the artistic unity of this wall that a division of the work between the two brothers has been attempted in vain (by Colasanti and others), while the stylistic differences from the Crucifixion are so notable as to raise the problem of the intervention of another hand (since the signature and the date are found below the Crucifixion), to which the Stories should be attributed. But much more probably these evident and already noted differences are due to the influence exercised on the painters by the sight of works of northern artists and probably by tapestries, with which even the coloristic qualities of these frescoes seem to be connected (Longhi). The frescoes of the Oratory of S. Monica at Fermo are also linked to the art of the S., while other paintings are assigned to them - two panels in the Gallery of Urbino - of attribution, however, that is anything but certain. It seems that Lorenzo had already died before 1420, while Jacopo was still alive in 1427. - See plate CIV.
Bibliography7 works
Piero Zampetti