Girolamo Muziano

GIROLAMO MUZIANO (Acquafredda, 1528 - Rome, 1592).
"Saint Francis.
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Size: 100 x 73,5 cm; 120 x 93 cm (frame).
In this sober and devotional scene, the painter represents St. Francis in an exterior that can hardly be appreciated due to the tenebrism of the scene. The saint is kneeling in prayer with his hands folded on his chest. The thick brushstrokes define a rounded figure of profound humanity, with great economy of colour, limited to the range of browns, which only serves to emphasise the message of humility and mystical simplicity that the saint advocated throughout his life. A twilight light emerges from the distance, modelling the elements of the landscape, but giving prominence to the figure which seems unique in the solitude and stillness of divinity. The subject of the Saint of Assisi receiving the stigmata was one of Mutienzio's favourites and was reproduced several times with the collaboration of his assistants, beginning with the version now in the Roman church of Santa Maria della Concezione, which Patrizia Tosini dates to around 1575 in her monograph on the painter.
Aesthetically, Gerolamo Muziano was incisively and lastingly seduced by the invention of the great master Sebastiano del Piombo, to whose dissemination various replicas produced in his workshop contributed. In addition to reworking the same compositional scheme in many paintings on different themes. Muziano was born in Acquafredda near Brescia but worked principally in Rome. According to accounts from the 16th to 20th centuries, Muziano began to work under the tutelage of Romanino, an imitator of Titian. However, a quasi-autobiographical account of Muziano written by his confessor (unpublished until 1954) indicates instead that Muziano was born in Brescia, left that city as a young man and that his first apprenticeship was under the tutelage of Domenico Campagnola and Lambert Sustris in 1544-46 in the city of Padua. He then spent some time in Venice until 1549, but moved permanently to Rome around 1550. Landscapes figured prominently in Muziano's early works, leading the Romans to nickname him Il giovane dei paesi (the young man of landscapes). Although he produced drawings and paintings in this genre throughout his career, his interest shifted towards large-format figure painting. Muziano painted religious and historical subjects in a style largely based on Michelangelo, emphasising the monumental anatomy of his figures, even in works depicting ascetic saints. Michelangelo himself declared him to be one of the "first artists of that time". Muziano became the most important artist in Rome in the 1570s and 80s, painting in a style that appealed to Counter-Reformation patrons.