SOLARIO, ANDREA. - Painter, b. in Milan between 1458 and 1460, younger brother of Cristoforo, whom he followed to Venice around 1490.
The earliest works of S. are especially influenced by the Venetian milieu, not without Lombard quattrocento reminiscences; among the oldest are the Bellinesque Madonna of the Poldi Pezzoli, the Alvisian Portrait of a Venetian Senator in the National Gallery in London, of ample Antonellesque breadth, the Portrait of a Young Man in the Brera, the Boston Portrait, the Ecce Homo of the Cook Galleries in Richmond and the Crespi in Milan. Of 1495 is the first dated and signed work, the Holy Family with St. Jerome (Brera), still predominantly Venetian; of 1499 the St. Catherine and the St. John the Baptist of the Poldi Pezzoli, more closely tied to the Leonardesque Lombard school, like the Female Portrait in the Museum of Palazzo Venezia and the Head of St. John the Baptist in the Louvre (1507). From 1507 to 1509 the painter is in France at the court of Card. George d'Amboise and there decorates with frescoes, now lost, the chapel of his Castle of Gaillon in Normandy. Ultramontane influences are noticeable in his subsequent works. In the famous Madonna of the Louvre, executed at the Castle of Amboise, known as the "green cushion" Madonna, the artist shows a marked approach to Leonardo, as also in the Ecce Homo of the Poldi Pezzoli. Mannerist elements are in the Christ Carrying the Cross of the Borghese Gallery (1511)
(phot. Alinari)
SOLARI (SOLARIO), CRISTOFORO CALLED IL GOBBO - Monument to Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, and to Beatrice d'Este - Pavia, church of the Certosa.
which must be stylistically compared to the impetuous Madonna of the Salting collection in London. From the last period are the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in the Poldi Pezzoli, 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. - See pl. LIX.
Bibliography3 works
Luisa Mortari