Domenico di Pace Beccafumi
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Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1486–1551) was an Italian Renaissance-Mannerist painter active predominantly in Siena. He is considered one of the last undiluted representative of the Sienese school of painting.
Contents
Biography
Domenico was born 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 Mecaro, a lesser Sienese artist. In 1509 he traveled to Rome, but soon returned to Siena, and 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 of mythological decorations for private patrons, only mildly influenced by the gestured Mannerist trends dominating neighboring Florence. 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 coloration that separates him from the classic Roman masters.Pavement of In addition to painting, he also directed the celebrated pavement of the cathedral of Siena from 1517-1544; 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[link], of Abraham[link] and of Moses[link]. He made a triumphal arch and an immense mechanical horse for the procession of the emperor Charles V on his entry into Siena.
Critical assessment and legacy
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 awkward. The setting is often hallucinogenic; the colors, discordant. For example, in the Nativity (San Martino, Siena) hovering angels form an architectural hoop, figures enter from the shadows of a ruined arch. In his annunciation, the virgin resides in a world neither in day or dusk, she and the Angel Gabriel shine while the house is in shambles. In Christ in Limbo (Siena Pinacoteca), an atypically represented topic, Christ sways in contrapostos 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. Beccafumi's style is among the last in a line of Sienese artists, a medieval believer of miracles awaking in Renaissance reality.
Partial anthology of works
- The Miraculous Communion of Saint Catherine of Siena (1513, Getty Museum)[link]
- Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata (1513, Getty Museum)[link]
- Trinity tryptich (1513, Pincoteca, Siena)[link]
- Marriage of St. Catherine (1514-15, Pinacoteca, Siena) [link]
- St. Paul (1515, Museo dell'Opere della Metropolitana, Siena)[link]
- Tanaquil (1519, National Gallery, London)[link]
- Marcia (1519, National Gallery, London)[link]
- Stigmatization of St. Catherine of Siena (1515, Pincoteca, Siena)[link]
- Self Portrait (1520)[link]
- St. Lucy (1521, Pincoteca, Siena)[link]
- The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine (1521, Hermitage, St. Petersburg)[link]
- Frescoes (Bindi-Segardi Palace, Siena)
- Frescoes (Palazzo Publico, Siena)[link]
- Vision of St. Catherine of Sienna (1528, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK)
- The Baptism of Christ (1528, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK)
- The Nativity (Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA)
- Venus and Cupid with Vulcan (1528, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA)
- Holy Family with St. John (1530, Uffizi Florence)[link]
- Holy Family with Saint Anne , (private) [link]
- Escape of Clelia and the Roman Virgins (Uffizi Florence)
- Punishment of Dathan (Duomo, Pisa)
- Drawing for Christ in Limbo (Stolen)[link]
- Christ in Limbo (1535, Pinacoteca, Siena)
- Moses and the Golden Calf (1536-7, Duomo, Pisa)[link]
- Saint Bernard of Siena Preaching (1537, Louvre Museum, Paris)[link]
- Saint Anthony and the Miracle of the Mule (1537, Louvre Museum, Paris)[link]
- Saint Francis receives the stigmata (1537, Louvre Museum, Paris)[link]
- Fall of the Rebel Angels (1540s, Pinacoteca, Siena)[link]
- Birth of the Virgin (1543, Accademia, Siena)[link]
- Annunciation (1545-6, Saints Martino and Vittoria, Sarteano)[link]
- Coronation of the Virgin (1540s, Santo Spirito, Siena)
- Madonna with infant and St. John (1540, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome)[link]
- Holy Family with Angels (National Gallery, Washington, DC)[link]
- Holy Family and St. John (Alte Pinakotek, Munich, Germany)[link]
- Statues of Angels (1548-50, Presbytery Duomo di Siena)[link]
- Drawing of Abraham [link]
- St. Peter (woodcut, 1547, Cleveland Museum Art)[link]
- Angels drawing (1524-25, San Francisco)[link]
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References
- Painting in Italy 1500-1600, S.J. Freedberg, (Penguin History of Art, 2nd Edition, 1983).
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