17 M. Lucco, ‘I due Girolami’, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Jürgen Winkelmann, Naples 1999, p. 167. 18 The documentation regarding San Michele in Bosco was first correctly interpreted by A. Mezzetti, 1977, cited in note 11, pp. 10, 42, note 24, 53; our artist’s name had previously been read by G. Zucchini, ‘San Michele in Bosco di Bologna’, L’Archiginnasio, XXXVIII, 1943, pp. 38-41, as “Girolamo da Ravenna”, a non-existent painter. For the documents relating to San Francesco in Ferrara, see Mezzetti, op. cit., p. 53. 19 D. Ekserdjian, Correggio, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 184. 20 Lucco, 1999, cited in note 17, pp. 165-183, especially pp. 169170, for further details. The work’s attribution to Dosso was already present in the 1632 inventory of the collection of Roberto Canonici in Ferrara: see Romani, 1994-1995, cited in note 13, vol. I, p. 306. For the documents of 1520 recording Girolamo in Garofalo’s workshop, see Mezzetti, 1977, cited in note 11, p. 52. 21 For the painting in Bergamo, see M. Danieli, in Garofalo. Pittore della Ferrara Estense, ed. by T. Kustodieva and Mauro Lucco, with the collaboration of M. Danieli, Milan 2008, p. 152. On the relation to the Pala Suxena, see the literature cited here. For the altarpiece in the Galleria Estense in Modena, see Romani, 1994-1995, cited in note 13, pp. 314-315 (there dated to c. 1519), and P. Humfrey, ‘Dosso Dossi et la peinture de retables’, Revue de l’Art, 119/1998-I, pp. 9-20, especially pp. 13-14 (dated to 1517/1518). 22 M. Lucco, 2004, cited in note 10, p. 366, and then in Garofalo, cited in note 21, pp. 182-183. For the attribution to Dosso, see Romani, 1994-1995, cited in note 13, p. 306. 23 For the altarpiece in Modena Cathedral, see Romani, 19941995, cited in note 13, pp. 332-333. 24 M. Lucco, ‘Portraits’, in P. Humfrey and M. Lucco, Dosso Dossi. Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, New York 1998, pp. 239-243, and then in ‘I due Girolami’ cited in note 17, p. 169.
Borghese, he received the commission to decorate the sacristy of San Michele in Bosco with frescoes. It is hardly fortuitous that a document of 1751 recalling those works and establishing the artists’ respective responsibilities, refers to him as “Girolamo da Carpi, detto da Modona”; but a posteriori, this does not necessarily mean, as I once thought,17 that the Bolognese frescoes were painted after his various journeyings through Emilia. What is certain is that only he reappears in Ferrara on 6 August 1530, when he was paid for the figures frescoed in the church of San Francesco.18 Today I am more inclined to believe that his work for San Michele in Bosco represents the initial phase of his wanderings, especially since Correggio’s Modenese altarpieces, securely datable to before 1530 (the date on Girolamo Comi’s copy of the Madonna of Saint George in the York Art Gallery),19 should more properly be dated to the second half of the 1520s. Girolamo’s stylistic evolution can be said to begin around 1520 (when he was still enrolled in Garofalo’s workshop) with the small canvas in the Picture Gallery in Budrio, a work generally ascribed to Dosso (Fig. 3);20 the figure of Saint Sebastian is very clearly conceptually indebted to that of his master in the Costabili Altarpiece, a documented work of 1513-14, and in the small panel in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (inv. 710) by the Garofalo workshop, while the Virgin in the clouds recalls not only Garofalo’s figure in the Pala Suxena (the celebrated altarpiece of 1514) but even more closely the one by Dosso in the Virgin and Child with Saints George and Michael of about 1517/1518, formerly in Sant’Agostino in Modena and now in the Galleria Estense there.21 However, the Budrio picture leans less towards Garofalo than to the world of Dosso’s forms, and the landscape speaks an entirely different language from that of his older teacher; moreover, the sky lit by an incredible aurora borealis, with the harmony between pink and grey of the kind one sees most frequently in the work of Girolamo da Carpi. A few years later, in the little altarpiece formerly in the church of San Martino in Codigoro, now in the Uffizi (Fig. 4) – which, as I have argued on another occasion, appears to be by our artist (though almost everyone believes it is by Dosso)22 – the stylistic preferences seems to be increasingly Dossoesque, notwithstanding its distance from the forms of the Ferrarese master: more simplified, more impenetrable and polished, firmer in bone structure, and with little of his luminous vibrancy. It is almost as if that world were already beginning to crack under the pressure of an attitude more coldly intellectual than joyously emotional. The echo of models by Dosso (the great luminous disc that offsets the Virgin, as in the Saint Sebastian altarpiece in Modena Cathedral, completed in May 1521, and the starched billowing of her cloak)23 would suggest a date around 1522/1523. The strong penchant for meteorological fantasy, expressed through pregnant, humid colours, can also be felt in the beautiful Portrait of a Soldier in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts,24 (Fig. 5) in which the chromatic brilliance and twilit atmosphere, moulded out of moisture and an incipiently nocturnal moment, seems to suggest an initial awareness of Correggio’s very recent Noli me tangere in the Ercolani residence. The dense, vibrant corporeal presence of the
38 Girolamo Sellari, called Girolamo da Carpi
Fig. 3 Girolamo da Carpi, The Virgin and Child in Glory between Saints Roch and Sebastian, Budrio, Pinacoteca Comunale “Inzaghi” Fig. 4 Girolamo da Carpi, The Virgin and Child in Glory between Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist (Codigoro Altarpiece), Florence, Uffizi