Domenico Beccafumi

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Template:Infobox artist Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486Template:SndMay 18, 1551) was an Italian Renaissance-Mannerist painter active predominantly in Siena. He is considered one of the last undiluted representatives of the Sienese school of painting.

Biography

Domenico was born in Montaperti, near Siena, the son of Giacomo di Pace, a peasant who worked on the estate of Lorenzo Beccafumi. Seeing his talent for drawing, Lorenzo adopted him, and commended him to learn painting from Mechero, a lesser Sienese artist.<ref>Hence an old nickname Il Mecherino, or sometimes written Meccharino, Meccarino, or Miccarino.</ref> In 1509 he travelled to Rome, where he learned from the artists who had just done their first work in the Vatican,<ref name="EB1911"/> but soon returned to Siena. However, while the Roman forays of two Sienese artists of roughly his generation (Il Sodoma and Peruzzi) had imbued them with elements of the Umbrian-Florentine Classical style, Beccafumi's style remains, in striking ways, provincial. In Siena, he painted religious pieces for churches and mythological decorations for private patrons,<ref name="EB1911">{{#if: | 

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  }}{{#ifeq:  ||}}</ref> only mildly influenced by the gestured Mannerist trends dominating the neighbouring Florentine school. There are medieval eccentricities, sometimes phantasmagoric, superfluous emotional detail and a misty non-linear, often jagged quality to his drawings, with primal tonality to his colouration that separates him from the classic Roman masters.

Pavement of Duomo di Siena

In addition to painting, he also directed the celebrated pavement of the cathedral of Siena from 1517 to 1544, a task that took over a century and a half. The pavement shows vast designs in commesso work—white marble, that is, engraved with the outlines of the subject in black, and having borders inlaid with rich patterns in many colours. From the year Beccafumi was engaged in continuing this pavement, he made very ingenious improvements in the technical processes employed and laid down scenes from the stories of Ahab and Elijah, of Melchisedec, of Abraham<ref name="getty.edu">Template:Cite web</ref> and of Moses. He made a triumphal arch and an immense mechanical horse for the procession of the emperor Charles V on his entry into Siena.<ref name="EB1911"/>

Critical assessment and legacy

File:Domenico Beccafumi 009.jpg
The beheading of Spurius Cassius Vecellinus, fresco (1532–1535), Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

Compared to the equilibrated, geometric, and self-assured Florentine style, the Sienese style of painting edges into a more irrational and emotionally unbalanced world. Buildings are often transected, and perspectives are awkward. The setting is often hallucinogenic; the colours are discordant. For example, in the Nativity (Church of San Martino) hovering angels form an architectural hoop, and figures enter from the shadows of a ruined arch. In his Annunciation, the Virgin resides in a world neither in day nor dusk, she and the Angel Gabriel shine while the house is in shadows. In Christ in Limbo (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena), an atypically represented topic, Christ sways in contrapposto as he enters a netherworld of ruins and souls. S. J. Freedberg compares his vibrant eccentric figures to those of the Florentine mannerist contemporary Rosso Fiorentino, yet more "optical and fluid". While all the elements of the expected religious scenes are here, it is like a play in which all the actors have taken atypical costumes, and forgotten some of their lines.

In medieval Italy, Siena had been an artistic, economic, and political rival of Florence; but wars and natural disasters caused a decline by the 15th century.Template:Sfn Stylistically, Beccafumi is among the last in a line of Sienese artists, a medieval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.

File:Domenico Beccafumi 024.jpg
Holy Family with St. John
File:St lucy 1521 Domenico Beccafumi.jpg
St Lucy, 1521. This painting was featured in the movie The Nun II
File:Domenico Beccafumi - Madonna and child with infant John the Baptist - Google Art Project.jpg
Madonna and child with infant John the Baptist
File:Beccafumi - culto di Vesta, 1397977, Museo di Casa Martelli.jpg
Cult of Vesta

Partial anthology of works

References

  • Painting in Italy 1500–1600, S.J. Freedberg, (Penguin History of Art, 2nd Edition, 1983).

Notes

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