TURA, Cosimo, called Cosmè. - Painter, b. at Guarda Ferrarese around 1430 and d. at Ferrara in April 1495.
From an examination of his youthful works, such as the precious small panel of the Madonna and Child (Harold J. Pratt collection, New York), with conspicuous ornamental motifs against the green background of an orange grove, one infers his spontaneous absorption of the values inherent in the late flowering Gothic.
But already in that period the figure of the Virgin, with the expressionism of the very long joined fingers and the melancholy of the face, foreshadows the painter's peculiar affective and poetic world. Later he strengthened his formal capacities on the examples of Piero della Francesca, active in Ferrara around 1450, while he took on splendors of chromatic relationships from the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, also in the service of Lionello d'Este. Under his successors, Borso and Ercole I, T. carried on an almost uninterrupted and feverish activity, employed at court in every sort of work, even of pure craftsmanship, from the cycle of allegorical panels decorating the delizia of Belfiore, to horse trappings and designs for table silver. It seems that he also painted panels with humanistic subjects in the library of the Pico princes, at Mirandola.
But together with those, numerous and important Ferrarese works of his were destroyed.
Despite the disparate stylistic influences, the head of the Po Valley school assumes in the history of fifteenth-century painting a quite particular prominence, for the often combined and coherent virtues of plastic imposingness, most polished linear exaltation, autonomy of chromatic accents, now enameled and heraldically vivid, now livid and mournful, but always in an expressive function, from the most adorned aestheticism to the most heart-rending popular passion. Extremely characteristic of T. are the rounded contours and the harsh movements of the draperies with irrational highlights or halos, which have the purpose of bringing out the profiles of the bodies whenever similar tonalities are placed side by side (a procedure analogous to that of engravers and particularly of woodcut artists) and with the result of conferring on the figures effects of relief and of monochrome on metal foil. Among the masterpieces of this evocative master, who transmitted part of his unmistakable requisites to the best representatives of the Ferrarese school down to about the middle of the sixteenth century, are numbered: the four panels with the Annunciate and St. George (doors of a demolished organ) in the Museum of the Cathedral at Ferrara; two small roundels, with episodes from the life of St. Maurelius, in the Picture Gallery of that city; the surviving panels of the dismembered Roverella altarpiece, formerly in S. Giorgio outside the walls, namely The Madonna Enthroned, in the National Gallery of London, the lunette of the Pietà in the Louvre, the shutter with Sts. Paul and Maurelius and an Olivetan monk praying, in the Colonna Gallery in Rome, the fragment with the head of St. George, in the Gallery of San Diego in California; the panels of the polyptych of the suburban church of S. Luca, dispersed among the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo (Madonna Enthroned), the Uffizi Gallery (St. Dominic), the Friedrich Museum of Berlin (St. Sebastian and St. Christopher), the Louvre Museum (St. Anthony of Padua); the allegory of Spring and the St. Jerome Penitent in the National Gallery of London; the Madonna with the Dead Christ in the Correr Museum of Venice; the Dead Christ Supported by Angels of the Vienna Museum; the St. Nicholas of Bari of the Museum of Nantes; the Bl. James of the March in the Gallery of Modena, the last known work of the master. - See pl. LX.
Bibliography13 works
Alberto Neppi