BRUSASORZI DOMENICO RICCIO Lot n° 82

BRUSASORZI DOMENICO RICCIO (1516-1567) 'San Sebastiano' oil cm. 85x234 Domenico Riccio, known as Brusasorci (Verona 1516 - 1567), was trained in the workshop of his father Agostino, a painter and miniaturist, and soon assimilated all the complexity of proto-Mannerist painting in the city of Verona, with suggestions from Raphael and Parmigianino, formal research in the style of Giulio Romano and Florentine echoes of colour. He established himself as one of the protagonists of the late sixteenth-century painting season in the city of Verona, also executing important fresco cycles for public commissions. Particularly significant for a comparison with the San Sebastiano presented here are the early frescoes with the Virgin and Saints in the church of Sant'Eufernia in Verona, where the small figures in the landscape with the stories of the saints are conducted in a very similar way to those of Sebastiano in our canvas. Much space is also given here to the landscape - in fact he dedicated himself specifically to this genre - animated by numerous figures in movement. It is precisely for the landscape that the comparison with the frescoes in the church of S.M. in Organo, also in his home town, is significant. The monumental and elegant figure of St. Sebastian also finds numerous iconographic references in the artist's work: in particular in the figure of Christ at the Column of the pen and watercolour drawing conserved in the Asmolean Museum in Oxford (inv. no. PII 129). The face of the saint, with its slightly foreshortened profile and the physiognomic characterization typical of the painter's work, also finds an immediate comparison in the face of Mary Magdalene that appears in the Crucifixion in the church of San Fermo in Verona, where it is once again the landscape in the background that constitutes a further reference to Brusasorci's style, which is evidently influenced by the airy and open manner of the Venetian scene. The figure of the little angel offering the crown of martyrdom is found in the altarpiece with Christ carrying the cross in the church of Santo Stefano in Verona, considered by Sgarbi to be "among the artist's first masterpieces" (in Palladio e la maniera. Pittori vicentini del Cinquecento e i collaboratori di Palladio, catalogue by Vittorio Sgarbi, Venice 1980, p. 42). The painting shows all the refinement of a formal elegance and a compositional balance with results of undoubted expressive strength just in the figure of Sebastiano who imposes himself full of charm to the attention of the observer.