SOLARIO, ANDREA. — Painter, born in Milan between 1458 and 1460, the younger brother of Cristoforo, whom he followed to Venice around 1490.
The earliest works of S. reflect above all the Venetian milieu, though not without reminiscences of fifteenth-century Lombardy. Among the oldest are the Bellinesque Madonna of the Poldi Pezzoli, the Alvisian Portrait of a Venetian Senator in the National Gallery, London, of broad Antonellesque design, the Portrait of a Young Man in Brera, the Boston Portrait, and the Ecce Homo in the Cook Galleries of Richmond and the Crespi Collection in Milan. The first dated and signed work is from 1495: the Holy Family with St Jerome (Brera), still predominantly Venetian. From 1499 are the St Catherine and St John the Baptist in the Poldi Pezzoli, more closely connected with the Lombard school of Leonardo, as are the Female Portrait in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia and the Head of St John the Baptist in the Louvre (1507). From 1507 to 1509 the painter was in France in the service of Cardinal George d’Amboise, for whom he decorated with frescoes, now lost, the chapel of his château at Gaillon in Normandy. His later works show transalpine influences. In the famous Madonna of the Louvre, executed at the Château d’Amboise and known as the “Green Cushion Madonna,” the artist displays a marked rapprochement with Leonardo, as he does in the Ecce Homo of the Poldi Pezzoli. Mannerist elements appear in the Christ Carrying the Cross in the Galleria Borghese (1511)
(phot. Alinari)
SOLARI (SOLARIO), CRISTOFORO DETTO IL GOBBO — Monument to Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, and to Beatrice d’Este — Pavia, church of the Certosa.
which should be stylistically compared with the impetuous Madonna in the Salting Collection in London. From the final period are the Rest in Egypt in the Poldi Pezzoli and the Pietà of Rossie in Scotland. Death overtook the artist around 1520 in Pavia, during the execution of the Assumption in the Certosa, completed (1576) by Bernardino Campi. — Vedi tav. LIX.