Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli
(1573 - 1626) |
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Altarpieces, Secular Narratives, Art Work
| Name: |
Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Morazzone |
| Nationality: |
Italian |
| Birth: |
1573 |
| Death: |
1626 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Altarpieces, Secular Narratives, |
| Medium: |
Oil on Canvas |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Italian Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Together with Giulio Cesare Procaccini and Giovanni Battista Crespi (II Cerano), II Morazzone formed the triad of Milan's leading painters during the first several decades of the seventeenth century. Adopting Flemish, Tuscan, and Roman mannerism, the powerful designs of Federico Barocci, and casting more than a casual glance at Gaudenzio Ferrari, II Morazzone brought to Milan a vigorous and powerful style that is at once eccentric yet mundanely realistic and characteristically Milanese in its love of emotional excess. Born the son of a mastermason in Morazzone (hence the nickname), Morazzone may have trained with Ventura Salimbeni before 1590/91. Around 1592 until 1598 he was in Rome, where some of his work remains in situ. An altarpiece of St. Ambrose and Charles in the church of SS. Carlo e Ambrogio and frescoes in S. Silvestro in Capite depicting the Visitation and The Adoration of the Magi have been ascribed to his Roman sojourn. Morazzone continued his career back in Lombardy, decorating Sacro Monte chapels with frescoes, as Gaudenzio Ferrari had already done a century before (1520/30). Unique to the Lombard region, these mixtures of painting, sculpture, and architecture have no true counterparts elsewhere in Italy. Morazzone began with the Cappella del Rosario in S. Vittore at Varese between 15^8 and 1599; these are his earliest documented paintings. He worked there again in 1615-17. Frescoes at Rho (ca. 1602-4) were followed in 1605 with frescoes for the Sacro Monte Ascent to Calvary Chapel in Varallo. From 1608 to 1609 he was working on the Flagellation Chapel of the Sacro Monte at Varese. From 1609 to 1613 he was busy with his most famous effort: the Ecce Homo Chapel of the Sacro Monte in Varallo. Demands for his services continued, and in 1614 he completed frescoes for the Condemnation to Death Chapel in the Sacro Monte in Varallo. From 1616 to 1620 he completed work on the Porziuncola Chapel of the Sacro Monte at Orta. In 1620 Morazzone was working on the chapel of a Pia Mortis Soldatis in S. Gaudenzio at Novara, for which he executed a large series of frescoes. This work was continued by yet another talented Lombard painter, Tanzio da Varallo* (1574/80-1635). He died in 1626, leaving his frescoes for the dome of Piacenza Cathedral to be completed later by Guercino. Requiring a large workshop to carry out such large enterprises, Morazzone carried medieval and renaissance workshop practices into the seventeenth century, overseeing designs and maintaining the quality of the entire production, adapting the concept of medieval mystery plays and Gaudenzio Ferrari's later contributions to his own treatment of these devotional chapels. Adding a dimension of illusionism by projecting architectural details into space and exaggerating the emotional range of his characters, Morazzone can fairly be said to have contributed to the many levels of illusionism that characterize much of Italian seventeenth-century art. Yet his work retains the clarity and directness of theater, of tableaux vivants (which had a long and ancient lineage) and is quite different from the mixtures of reality that Bernini later introduced in Rome. Besides these numerous fresco enterprises, Morazzone is credited with a number of canvases - religious subjects given an intense piety by their dramatic lighting and the charged expressions on his subjects' faces. Like Giulio Cesare Procaccini and II Cerano, Morazzone participated in the vast program of canvases illustrating the life of St. Carles Borromeo for the Milan Duomo, begun in 1602 and expanded in 1610. Of his canvases, his Pentecost (dated to around 1615, Milan, Castello Sforzesco) is one of the most original conceptions of this subject in the history of art. In 1616 he completed an Ecce Homo for the Podesta" of Novara. Five years later Morrazone collaborated with his two famous contemporaries on the famous three-master-picture, the Martyrdom o/SS. Rufina and Seconda (dated 1620), which is now in the Brera. Considered the key to his late style, Morazzone's contributions were the background figures. To that phase in Morazzone's career can be added a spectacular Last Judgement (Novara, Basilica di San Gaudenzio), which shows that he also must have looked at the work of Domenico Beccafumi. In these and other paintings, Morazzone's use of chiaroscuro, his compression of figures into shallow spaces, and his exaggerated gestures give his narratives a hallucinatory, dramatic power. |
Samples of Work
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