Giampietrino

While it is hard to provide a firm chronology for Giampietrino’s work, among his early works are a series of small full-length female nudes, anong them a Leda (Staatliche Museen, Kassel), a Diana (Metropolitan Museum, New York) and a Venus and Cupid (Private collection, Milan). The flesh tones are pale, enlivened with pink highlights and the modeling is achieved with an understated sfumato.

More obviously indebted to Leonardo are the small paintings of the Madonna and Child, of which an exquisite example is the Madonna with the Cherries (ex Rob Smeets collection, Milan) and a slightly later Madonna with the Apple (Brera, Milan) which exists in numerous versions. Giampietrino looks not only at Leonardo but his own contemporaries, notably Andrea Solario (1460-1524) and Bernadino Luini (1482-1532). Solario’s influence is especially noticeable in his highly colored depictions of femmes fatales such as the Salome (Private collection, London) while Luini’s palette, with its dominant greens and reds, and the seraphic sweetness of expression are evident in works like the large Madonna and Child enthroned with Saints (Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Milan).

In addition to his depictions of the Holy Family, Giampietrino supplied a demand for single-figured portrayals of the suffering Christ: subjects such as Christ Carrying the Cross (National Gallery, London), Ecce Homo and Christ Crowned with Thorns. In them, Christ’s pale figure is usually set against a dark background and enfolded in dramatic red drapery. The intense religiosity of these images parallels the production of similar subjects by Giampietrino’s Spanish contemporary, Luis Morales.