TURA, COSIMO, called COSMÉ. – Painter, b. at Guarda Ferrarese about 1430 and d. at Ferrara in Apr. 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 striking ornamental motifs against the green background of an orange grove, one may infer his spontaneous assimilation of the values inherent in the late flowering Gothic style.
Yet already at that time the figure of the Virgin, with the expressionism of her extremely long, clasped fingers and the melancholy of her face, foreshadowed the painter’s distinctive emotional and poetic world. Later he strengthened his formal abilities through the examples of Pier della Francesca, active in Ferrara around 1450, while deriving splendid chromatic relationships from the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, who was likewise in the service of Lionello d’Este. Under his successors, Borso and Ercole I, T. pursued an almost uninterrupted and feverish activity, employed at court for every kind of work, including purely handicraft tasks, from the cycle of allegorical panels decorating the delizia of Belfiore to horse trappings and designs for table silverware. It seems that he also painted panels with humanistic subjects in the library of the Pico princes at Mirandola.
But along with these, numerous important works by him in Ferrara were destroyed.
Despite the disparate stylistic influences, this leading painter of the Po Valley occupies an altogether particular position in the history of fifteenth-century painting, on account of the often combined and coherent virtues of imposing plasticity, highly refined linear exaltation, and autonomy of chromatic accents, at times enamel-like and heraldically vivid, at times livid and somber, but always expressive in function, ranging from the most ornate aestheticism to the most heartrending popular passion. Particularly characteristic of T. are the rounded contours and harsh movements of the draperies, with highlights or irrational haloes whose purpose is to make the outlines of the bodies emerge whenever similar tonalities are placed side by side (a procedure analogous to that of engravers, and especially woodcut artists), with the result of giving the figures the effects of relief and of monochrome on a metal sheet. Among the masterpieces of this evocative master, who transmitted some of his unmistakable qualities to the finest representatives of the Ferrarese school until around the middle of the sixteenth century, are: the four panels with the Annunciation and S. George (doors of a demolished organ) in the Cathedral Museum at Ferrara; two small roundels, with episodes from the life of s. Maurelius, in the Pinacoteca of that city; the surviving panels of the dismembered Roverella altarpiece, formerly in S. Giorgio suburbano, namely The Madonna Enthroned, in the National Gallery, London, the large lunette of the Pietà in the Louvre, the wing with SS. Paul and Maurelius and a praying Olivetan monk, in the Colonna Gallery in Rome, and the fragment with the head of S. George, in the S. Diego Gallery in California; the panels of the polyptych from the suburban church of S. Luca, dispersed among the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (Madonna Enthroned), the Uffizi Gallery (S. Dominic), the Friedrich Museum in Berlin (S. Sebastian and s. Christopher), and the Louvre Museum (S. Anthony of Padua); the allegory of Spring and the Penitent S. Jerome in the National Gallery, London; the Madonna with the Dead Christ in the Correr Museum in Venice; the Dead Christ Supported by Angels in the Vienna Museum; the S. Nicholas of Bari in the Nantes Museum; the B. James of the March in the Modena Gallery, the master’s last known work. – Vedi tav. LX.