Tanzio da Varallo

In the 1620s one sees the deepening influence of his Milanese contemporaries notably Cerano which is evident in the dramatic St Carlo Borromeo carrying the Holy Nail in Procession, painted in 1628 (Cellio Parish Church) and the huge and theatrical Battle of Sennacherib (San Gaudenzio, Novarra). This ‘dramatic and emotional work, its foreground crowded with distorted, brutally realistic figures lit by violent slashes of light and shadowed by the vast expanse of darkness above’ betrays his debt to the art of Morazzone. Tanzio’s smaller, devotional works of this period such as the St John the Baptist (Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, OK) and St Sebastian Tended by Angels (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) are graceful, highly colored, works of great quality whose cool tones suggest a memory of Orazio Gentileschi. In 1630, the plague returned to Lombardy and Tanzio’s palette becomes more muted. He paints, in direct response, the votive altarpiece St Roch interceding on behalf of the People of Camasco (Museo Civico, Varallo)—St Roch being a saint thought to protect the faithful from the plague. At the same time Tanzio shows an increased interest in landscapes, reflecting perhaps the taste in Federico Borromeo’s Milan for the works of Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), Paul Bril (1554–1626) and Jan Breughel (1568–1625). He paints a series of agitated hermits in acid-colored, wild landscapes such as St Benedict among Thorns (Francesco Cerruti Collection, Castello di Rivoli, Turin) clearly referencing the paintings of Breughel and the prints of Jan Sadeler.