5 For a good summary of this question see R. Bartoli, ‘Itinerario transappenninico. Rapporti tra Firenze e l’Emilia Romagna alla fine del Quattrocento e nei primi anni del Cinquecento’, in G. Agostini and C. Pedrini, eds., Innocenzo da Imola. Il tirocinio di un artista, Casalecchio di Reno, 1993, pp. 91-99. 6 G. Agostini and C. Pedrini, ‘“Decus Civitatis Imolae”. La formazione di Innocenzo attraverso i documenti’, in Innocenzo da Imola, 1993, cited in note 5, pp. 31-42, and especially pp. 38-39. 7 See the entry on Girolamo da Carpi in this catalogue. 8 R. Longhi, Ampliamenti nell’Officina Ferrarese (1940), in Edizione delle Opere Complete di Roberto Longhi. V. Officina Ferrarese, Florence 1968, p. 161. 9 Longhi, 1968, cited in note 8, p. 161. 10 G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, Florence 1568, ed. G. Milanesi, 1878-1885, vol. V, pp. 197-188; Vasari, The Lives, English translation by G. du C. de Vere, New York 1996, vol. I, p. 917.
applied not only to painters but strongly motivated patrons. As far as I know, little has been done as regards research on Count Giovanni Battista Bentivoglio, who seems to me to be the first and most authoritative Bolognese partisan of Raphael’s painting, ever ready and zealous, with appropriate guarantees, in advising (if not strictly imposing) public patronage of artists of that ilk, and consequently creating what was almost a monopoly of taste. He was the one who invited Innocenzo da Imola to come to Bologna, and provided the guarantee to the Prior of San Michele in Bosco for the numerous works the painter was to undertake for the convent;6 he was the one who summoned Baldassarre Peruzzi; and his, too, was the act of persuading and subsequently offering a guarantee to the officers of the Ospedale di San Biagio, for the altarpiece by Girolamo da Treviso the Younger,7 destroyed in Berlin in 1945 – to name but the most clearly documented instances. Bolognese painters who could be called raffaelleschi, often lumped together as if they were all equals, and without a sense of relative importance, were more than one in number; and we have already named Innocenzo da Imola. In his frescoes for San Michele in Bosco, painted roughly between 1518 and 1520, he offered proof “of a certain Tuscan cleanliness, of precise but deeply-felt physiognomies that still helped him keep his balance in his portraits of the Olivetans”8 – qualities which formed the most vivid part of the project for Roberto Longhi, who never had a soft spot for painters of that manner.9 This was the fruit of a calling for portraiture explicitly mentioned by Vasari: “He made a portrait, also, besides many others, of Cardinal Francesco Alidosio, which I have seen at Imola, together with the portrait of Cardinal Bernardino Carniale [sic, for Carvajal], and both are works of no little beauty”.10 Nothing survives of that talent today but the Portrait of a Woman in the Borghese Gallery, Rome (Fig. 2), and that of A Woman dressed as Mary Magdalen, dated 1543, in the Pinacoteca Estense, Modena (Fig. 3), both from Innocenzo’s last years. But the two lost portraits cited by Vasari, which were still in Imola in his day, must have belonged to the early years of his career: Alidosi, who was from the territory of Imola, had died on 24 May 1511, and Carvajal, who was never there, died in 1523. Portraiture, then, flows like a leitmotiv through the artist’s entire career. Considering only the examples cited above, there is apparently not much solid
50 Innocenzo Francucci, called Innocenzo da Imola
Fig. 2 Innocenzo da Imola, Portrait of a Woman, Rome, Borghese Gallery Fig. 3 Innocenzo da Imola, Portrait of a Woman as Mary Magdalen, Modena, Galleria Estense