TURA, COSIMO, called COSME. — Painter, b. in Guarda Ferrarese around 1430, d. in Ferrara in April 1495.
From an examination of his early works, such as the precious panel of the Madonna and Child (Harold J. Pratt collection, New York), with its striking ornamental motifs against the green background of an orange grove, one can discern his thorough absorption of the values inherent in late-flowering Gothic art.
Yet even at that stage, the figure of the Virgin, with the expressionism of her very long joined fingers and the melancholy of her face, foreshadowed the painter’s distinctive affective and poetic world. Later, he strengthened his formal abilities by studying the examples of Piero della Francesca, active in Ferrara around 1450, while he adopted the splendid chromatic relationships of the Fleming Rogier van der Weyden, also in the service of Lionello d’Este. Under the successors of Lionello, Borso and Ercole I, Tura carried out an almost uninterrupted and feverish activity, employed at court in all kinds of work, even purely artisanal tasks, from the cycle of allegorical panels decorating the delizia of Belfiore to horse trappings and designs for table silverware. It seems he also painted panels with humanistic subjects in the library of the Pico princes in Mirandola.
But along with these, many important Ferrarese works by him were destroyed.
Despite the disparate stylistic influences, the leading figure of the Padane school occupies a very special place in the history of 15th-century painting, thanks to the often combined and coherent virtues of imposing plasticity, supremely refined linear exaltation, autonomy of chromatic accents—now enamelled and heraldically vivid, now livid and mournful—but always in the service of expression, ranging from the most adorned aestheticism to the most heartrending popular passion. Extremely characteristic of Tura are the rounded contours and the subtle halos or irrational glows around the figures, which serve to make the profiles of the bodies stand out whenever similar tonalities are juxtaposed (a procedure analogous to that of engravers and, in particular, woodcut artists), with the result of giving the figures the effects of embossing and monochrome on metal sheet.
Among the masterpieces of this captivating master, who transmitted some of his unmistakable qualities to the best representatives of the Ferrarese school until around the mid-16th century, are counted: the four panels with the Annunciate and St George (antependium of an organ) in the Museo del Duomo, Ferrara; two small tondos with episodes from the life of St Maurelius in the Pinacoteca of that city; the surviving panels of the dismembered Roverella altarpiece, formerly in S. Giorgio Suburbano, namely: the Madonna in Majesty in the National Gallery, London; the lunette of the Pietà in the Louvre; the shutter with SS Paul and Maurelius and an Olivetan monk in prayer in the Galleria Colonna, Rome; the fragment with the head of St George in the San Diego Gallery, California; the panels of the polyptych of the suburban church of S. Luca, now dispersed between the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (Madonna in Majesty), the Uffizi Gallery (St Dominic), the Friedrich Museum, Berlin (SS Sebastian and Christopher), and the Louvre (St Anthony of Padua); the allegory of Spring and St Jerome in Penitence in the National Gallery, London; the Dead Christ with Angels in the Correr Museum, Venice; the Dead Christ Supported by Angels in the Museum of Vienna; the St Nicholas of Bari in the Museum of Nantes; and the Blessed James of the Marches in the Gallery of Modena, the last known work of the master. — See pl. LX.