Moretto da Brescia

The leading Brescian painter of his generation, Moretto was equally accomplished as a painter of richly colored altarpieces and of imposing portraits of the Brescian elite. First documented as an independent master in 1516, he primarily worked in his native town. Trips to Venice early in his career and again in 1549 are apparent in the lasting influence of Titian on his work, but Moretto also traveled throughout Lombardy and the Veneto, including to Bergamo in 1529 and 1537. His style reveals affinities with the work of Lorenzo Lotto and Girolamo Romanino, both of whom he collaborated with in the 1520s, and with Lombard realism as practiced by Savoldo.

The Morgan drawing is a highly finished study for Moretto’s altarpiece of St. Nicholas of Bari Presenting Pupils of Galeazzo Rovellio to the Virgin and Child, painted for the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Brescia in 1539 and now in the Pinacoteca Civica Tosio-Martinengo in that same town.¹ St. Nicholas, possibly endowed with the features of the donor Rovellio, is shown ushering forward two of his pupils who offer the saint’s golden spheres and miter to the Virgin and child. Fewer than a dozen drawings securely connected to paintings or frescoes by Moretto are known.² As such, the Morgan sheet is a particularly valuable document of the master’s style. Like nearly all studies convincingly attributed to Moretto, St. Nicholas of Bari Presents Children to the Virgin and Child is drawn in a precise, linear manner on blue paper. Moretto painstakingly prepared the details of the composition with a sharp-nibbed pen, silhouetting the scene and making use of light wash and minimal hatching to create shadows. A few white highlights indicate a strong light source in the foreground at left, illuminating the chapel interior and giving relief to its architectural features.

The viewpoint from slightly below onto the scene presumably reflects the original elevated position of the altarpiece. For the final painted version, Moretto raised the Virgin and child quite significantly, possibly because a greater visual separation between the heavenly and earthly realm was deemed more decorous or because a stronger diagonal impetus was sought, as in Titian’s Pesaro Madonna. The marbling of the stone panel beneath the Virgin’s throne and plants sprouting from cracks in the architecture were added. The cartouche now bears the dedication Virgini deiparae et divo Nicolao Galeatius Rovellius ac discipuli d.d.MDXXXIX. (Dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mother of God and St. Nicholas by Galeazzo Rovellio and his pupils in 1539). An outline engraving by Alessandro Sala of this particularly successful composition was included as part of the series of twenty-five engravings highlighting Brescia’s most noteworthy paintings published in 1827 under the title Selected Paintings of Brescia (Quadri scelti di Brescia).³

The implication of the painting’s inscription and Ridolfi’s statement that Rovellio was a schoolmaster is corroborated by the parish records of Santa Maria dei Miracoli from 1534, which identify Rovellio as a “maestro di grammatica.”⁴ Born around 1472 in Rovato, a small town about ten miles outside of Brescia, Rovellio resided in the parish and may have received pupils at his own home, as was common at the time. In commissioning an altarpiece of himself with his pupils for his parish church, he followed the example of the schoolmaster Giovanni Testerio, whose painting by Paolo da Caylina, of 1533, is also in the Pinacoteca in Brescia.⁵

Alfonso Litta’s suggestion that the Morgan study is a copy by Moretto’s pupil Giovanni Battista Moroni after the painting is not convincing.⁶ Numerous differences between the drawing and the finished painting make it unlikely that the former is a copy, and the traditional attribution to Moretto by the old inscriptions as well as stylistic proximity to other drawings by the master provide strong arguments against such a proposal. Less impressive yet comparable in style are two studies by Moretto for the cathedral of Asola, near Mantua—one in the Louvre for the Erythrean Sibyl, the other in the British Museum for the Prophet Isaiah—both from around 1525.⁷

The distinctive gold-stamped and embossed border around the drawing is characteristic of mounts from the collection of Robert Paston, the first Earl of Yarmouth. These resemble John Talman’s mounts, but the gold of Talman’s mounts is painted rather than embossed. Paston was an avid collector of books, and the treatment of his mounts is more closely aligned with book than drawing or print collecting.⁸

—REP

Footnotes:

1. Bona Castellotti and Lucchesi Ragni 2014, 235–37, no. 121.
2. Lucchesi Ragni in Brescia 1988, 223–46.
3. For an impression, see the British Museum, inv. 1862,1213.494.
4. Ridolfi 1914–24, 1:264, speaking of Moretto: “Nella Madonna de’ Miracoli, per l’altare eretto da Galeazzo Rovellio, Maestro di Scola, fece il San Nicolò, che raccomanda alla protettione della Vergine alcuni fanciulli, ritratti dal natural, & in cartella à piedi vi è scritto: Beatea Vigini Dei Parae ac Beato Nicolao / Galeatius Rovellius 1539.” Guerrini 1921, 119 and 126, cited by De Pascale in Lucchesi Ragni and Stradiotti 2004, 153.
5. Matteo Zombolo in Bona Castellotti and Lucchesi Ragni 2014, no. 96.
6. Litta in Facchinetti 2004, 114, “che per la tipologia, e per lo stile, sarei tentato di ritenere opera del Moroni”; cited by Facchinetti in London 2014–15, 129.
7. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 3; British Museum, London, inv. Pp,3.205. See Paris 1993, 424–25; and Brescia 1988, no. 4b.
8. See King David and a Prophet (inv. I, 89), Figino album (inv. 1964.1), and Marcantonio Raimondi (inv. IV, 55) in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. For a similar Yarmouth mount, see also the Pordenone drawing the Continence of Scipio in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, inv. rsa 923; Edinburgh 2004, no. 97. For the collector, but without a discussion of the drawings, see Wenley 1991, passim, referring to an inventory of 1687 in the British Library and letters in the Norfolk Record Office; see also New Haven 2018, 204–13.