SOLARIO, ANTONIO, known as lo ZINGARO. – Painter, active in the last decade of the 1400s and the early 1500s. In his works he blends Venetian, Umbrian, Marchesian and Lombard elements, while remaining faithful to his initial predominantly Venetian training.
The frescoes depicting the Stories of St Benedict in the cloister of SS. Severino and Sossio in Naples (c. 1495) are collaborative works, dating from before the period he spent in the Marches, where the painter left the fresco in S. Esperanzio in Cingoli, the altarpiece in S. Francesco in Osimo (1503), and the altarpiece for the church of the Carmine in Fermo; the last of these also shows Umbrian influences, which become more explicit in the Madonna of Mercy in the church of the same name in Macerata and in the Saints in London. Venetian memories from Vicenza, however, always remain dominant, deriving from Montagna and Fogliono, and there are reminiscences of Alvise Vivarini: thus in the Madonna and Child with a worshipper in Naples, and from Giambellino in the Madonna Wertheimer, formerly in Leningrad, with its softer and more blended colouring. Dated and signed 1508 is the Head of St John in the Ambrosiana in Milan, akin to Andrea Solario, displaying a minute and refined Lombard technique, which is found in other works such as the Holy Family in Amsterdam and Salome in the Doria Gallery in Rome, of 1511. – See pl. LIX.