Ludovico Mazzolino

Of Ferrarese origin, Mazzolino trained with Ercole de’ Roberti and probably entered Lorenzo Costa’s workshop in Bologna after Ercole’s death.¹ By the early sixteenth century, however, he had returned to Ferrara, where he received prestigious independent commissions from the ruling Este family.² He is noted for his refined devotional paintings for private patrons, typically scenes from the New Testament in elaborate architectural settings decorated with classically inspired reliefs.

The Morgan drawing is a study for Mazzolino’s masterpiece, the imposing Christ Disputing with the Doctors commissioned by Francesco Caprara for the church of San Francesco in Bologna and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.³ Signed and dated 1524, the painting is singled out by Giorgio Vasari, who omits all reference to other works by the artist: “Lodovico Malino . . . by whom there are many works in his native city and in other places; but the best that he made was a panel which is in the Church of San Francesco in Bologna, in a chapel near the principal door, representing Jesus Christ at the age of twelve disputing with the Doctors in the Temple.”⁴ The drawing emphasizes the incongruous situation of the young Jesus teaching the learned men by making him look younger than his twelve years and isolating him in the vortex of a swirling mass of excitedly gesticulating adults. Near the right edge of the composition, among the amazed teachers in the Temple who are consulting books and conferring among themselves, stand Joseph and Mary—identified by their haloes—who have just discovered their son after a three-day search, as recounted by the Gospel of Luke (2:45–47). In the painting, Mazzolino added the male figures dressed in a fur-trimmed garment at left, to whom Christ seems to gesture; this must be a portrait of the donor. The painting extends the composition at top to include reliefs above the arches and an architrave that may have been trimmed from the drawing. A copy in pen and ink after the Berlin painting (or of a late study for it) is in the Albertina.⁵ Numerous simplified or slightly altered painted versions attest to the popularity of this tremendously successful composition.⁶

Although none of the figures in the Morgan study is a direct quotation, there are distinct echoes of Raphael’s Vatican fresco of the Disputa and, to a lesser degree, of the School of Athens, both of which were known through prints. The drawing also reveals knowledge of a Raphaelesque composition of the same subject that appears to have been circulating in Bologna and Ferrara during the early decades of the sixteenth century, giving rise to numerous derivations. That work survives in three drawn versions, one in the British Museum (considered an anonymous copy after Raphael, showing the architectural upper half almost free of figures),⁷ the Galleria Estense, Modena (as anonymous),⁸ and the Louvre, Paris (attributed to Bartolomeo Ramenghi, known as Bagnacavallo, and inspired by Raphael).⁹ Further variations include a drawing attributed to Bagnacavallo offered at auction in 2008,¹⁰ a painting of Christ Among the Doctors by Benvenuto Tisi, known as Garofalo, in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, and a related drawing in Modena.¹¹

With his lively, multifigured design and complex architectural setting, Mazzolino may have set himself up in competition to Baldassare Peruzzi, whose overwhelming chiaroscuro cartoon Adoration of the Magi made in 1522–23 for another prominent Bolognese patron, Count Giovanni Battista Bentivoglio, must have caused quite a stir. Describing Peruzzi’s composition, Vasari praised “a Nativity with the Magi, in chiaroscuro, wherein it is a marvelous thing to see the horses, the equipage, and the courts of the three Kings, executed with supreme beauty and grace, as are all the walls of the temples and some buildings round the hut.”¹² The Morgan study was thought to be by Peruzzi as late as 1891 and shows Mazzolino working in a distinctively northern Italian technique similar to the one Peruzzi used for the cartoon.¹³ The composition emerges primarily from the white heightening applied with the brush, set off by the heavily washed paper, with the few crisp pen lines serving only as a guide. This technique is also associated with the work of Polidoro da Caravaggio (see I, 20) as well as that of Bagnacavallo and Biagio Pupini, who were active in Bologna from 1511 until 1551.

—REP

Footnotes:

1. Vasari 1996, 1:483; Vasari 1878–85, 3:138–39.
2. Grasso 2008.
3. On the painting, see Zamboni 1968, 22.
4. Vasari 1996, 1:483; Vasari 1878–85, 3:139.
5. Birke and Kertész 1992–97, 1: inv. 24. In this author’s view, the drawing is incorrectly listed as a study by Mazzolino for the painting. I thank Jennifer Tonkovich for having examined for me the Vienna drawing in the original.
6. National Gallery, London, inv. 1495. For some of the other versions, see Zamboni 1968, figs. 23 and 62b.
7. British Museum, London, inv. 1857,0520.63. See Pouncey and Gere 1962, 1: no. 56.
8. Galleria Estense, Modena, inv. 1283 (attributed to Luca Penni in the eighteenth century). See Bentini 1989, 134–35, as anonymous copy of Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 10079.
9. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 10079 (as Bartolomeo Ramenghi the Elder, known as Bagnacavallo). Pouncey and Gere convincingly argued that all three are copies after a lost Raphael (1962, 1:44).
10. Sotheby’s, New York, 23 January 2008, lot 28, as Bagnacavallo.
11. Galleria Estense, Modena, inv. 1207. See Bentini 1989, 136–37. For an overview of the related compositions, see Bernardini 1990, 24–25.
12. Vasari 1996, 1:813; Vasari 1878–85, 4:597– 98. The cartoon is in the British Museum, London, inv. 1994,0514.49.
13. It was attributed to Baldassarre Peruzzi at the Christie’s, London, 24 April 1891, sale, although by 1894 the drawing was recognized as by Mazzolino for the Berlin painting.