Amico Aspertini
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
painter whose complex, eccentric, and eclectic style anticipates Mannerism
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
. He is considered among the first of the Bolognese School of painting
Bolognese School (painting)
The Bolognese School or the School of Bologna of painting flourished in Bologna, the capital of Emilia Romagna, between the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, and rivalled Florence and Rome as the center of painting. Its most important representatives include the Carracci family, including Ludovico...
.
Biography
He was born in BolognaBologna
Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...
to a family of painters (Guido Aspertini and Giovanni Antonio Aspertini, his father), and studied under masters such as Lorenzo Costa
Lorenzo Costa
Lorenzo Costa was an Italian painter of the Renaissance.-Biography:He was born at Ferrara, but moved to Bologna by the his early twenties, and would be more influential to the Bolognese school of painting. However, many artists worked in both nearby cities, and thus others consider him a product...
and Francesco Francia. He is briefly documented in Rome between 1500–1503, returning to Bologna and painting in a style influenced by Pinturicchio
Pinturicchio
Bernardino di Betto, called Pintoricchio or Pinturicchio was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He acquired his nickname, Pintoricchio , because of his small stature, and he used it to sign some of his works....
. In Bologna in 1504, he joined Francia and Costa in painting frescoes for the newly restored Oratory of Santa Cecilia in San Giacomo Maggiore, a work commissioned by Giovanni II Bentivoglio
Giovanni II Bentivoglio
Giovanni II Bentivoglio was an Italian nobleman who ruled as tyrant of Bologna from 1463 until 1506. He had no formal position, but held power as the city's "first citizen." The Bentivoglio family ruled over Bologna from 1443, and repeatedly attempted to consolidate their hold of the Signoria of...
.
In 1507-09, he painted a fresco cycle in San Frediano in Lucca
Lucca
Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...
. Asperini painted in 1508-1509 the splendid frescoes in the Chapel of the Cross in the Basilica di San Frediano
Basilica di San Frediano
The Basilica of San Frediano is a Romanesque church in Lucca, Italy, situated on the Piazza San Frediano.Fridianus was an Irish bishop of Lucca in the first half of the 6th century. He had a church built on this spot, dedicated to St. Vincent, a martyr from Zaragoza, Spain. When Fridianus was...
in Lucca
Lucca
Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...
. Aspertini was also one of two artists chosen to decorate a triumphal arch for the entry into Bologna of Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V was ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 and, as Charles I, of the Spanish Empire from 1516 until his voluntary retirement and abdication in favor of his younger brother Ferdinand I and his son Philip II in 1556.As...
in 1529.
He died in Bologna.
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...
describes Aspertini as having an eccentric personality, who, half-insane, worked so rapidly with both hands that chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted"....
was split, chiaro in one hand, scuro in the other. He quotes Aspertini as complaining that all other Bolognese colleagues were copying Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
. Aspertini also painted façade decorations (all lost), and altarpieces, many of which are often eccentric and charged in expression. For example, his Bolognese Pieta appears to occur in an other-worldy electric sky.
Anthology of works
- Adoration of the Shepherds - Staatliche Museen, Berlin
- Adoration of the Shepherds (1515) - Uffizi, Florence http://www.wga.hu/html/a/aspertin/adoratio.html
- Domus Aurea
- Frescoes, Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, Bologna
- San FredianoBasilica di San FredianoThe Basilica of San Frediano is a Romanesque church in Lucca, Italy, situated on the Piazza San Frediano.Fridianus was an Irish bishop of Lucca in the first half of the 6th century. He had a church built on this spot, dedicated to St. Vincent, a martyr from Zaragoza, Spain. When Fridianus was...
, Lucca - San Michele, Bosco
- Pieta with Saint Mark, Ambrose, John the Evangelist, and Anthony Abbot (1519) - San Petronio, Bologna)http://www.italicon.it/museo/I031-003.htm
- Saint Sebastian http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=45817+0+none
- Battle of the Amazons (Italy)
- San Giacomo Maggiore
- Profile of Hero (1496) - Christian MuseumChristian Museum (Hungary)The Christian Museum is the largest ecclesiastical collection in Hungary; it conserves European and Hungarian works of art from the period between the 13th and 19th centuries....
, EsztergomEsztergomEsztergom , is a city in northern Hungary, 46 km north-west of the capital Budapest. It lies in Komárom-Esztergom county, on the right bank of the river Danube, which forms the border with Slovakia there....
http://www.wga.hu/html/a/aspertin/heroic.html - Madonna Enthroned with Saints, (c. 1515) - San Martino, Bologna)
- Holy Family with Saints (after 1530) - Saint Nicolas aus Champs, Paris