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Lot Essay
This striking panel showing Christ Carrying the Cross is a rare surviving work in oil by the Bologonese Mannerist painter Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, called Nosadella. Nosadella developed a highly individual style, combining the advanced form of Roman Mannerism from his teacher, Pellegrino Tibaldi, with a more classicising idiom reflecting the influence of Raphael. The strident tonality, angular, heavy drapery and compressed composition are all characteristic of Nosadella’s work, as is the artist’s interest in naturalistic detail, which is evident here in the fluidly captured landscape. This picture can be compared stylistically with Nosadella’s Holy Family with Saints Anne, Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene in The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (c. 1560s) which, like the present work, had previously been attributed to Tibaldi. There is also a striking similarity in the figure of Simon of Cyrene, shown to the right of Christ, with that of Saint Joseph in the Getty picture, both of whom are wearing an unusual red cap.
Giovanni Francesco Bezzi was born in Bologna sometime during the early 1530s. What little we know about his life mostly comes from Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who writes in his Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678) that the painter’s nickname was taken from the name of the street where he lived. Bezzi matriculated as a painter at the Compagnia delle Quattro Arti in 1549, but we have no word of his career prior to 1558, when he was commissioned to paint decorations for a frieze in the house of Senator Camillo Bolognetti. These paintings do not survive, though Malvasia records that their subject was, fittingly, the history of Camillo. Concerning Bezzi’s style, Malvasia tells us, 'those few works by him that are known — and they are mostly frescos — are distinguished by their good colour, as with his master [Tibaldi] and are full of erudition. If they are not as perfect and studied [as those of Tibaldi], they are perhaps more powerful, singular, and resolute' (English translation from The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 147). Alongside Girolamo Mirola, Bezzi was apprenticed to Tibaldi, whose extravagant style must have had a profound influence on the young painter. Only two of the paintings Malvasia ascribes to Bezzi’s hand survive, namely the Madonna and Child with the Blessed Raniero and Saints Peter, Paul and Jerome in the Oratorio dei Battuti in the church of Santa Maria della Vita, painted in 1563, and the Circumcision of Christ in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the latter of which was completed by Prospero Fontana following Bezzi’s death in 1571.
Giovanni Francesco Bezzi was born in Bologna sometime during the early 1530s. What little we know about his life mostly comes from Carlo Cesare Malvasia, who writes in his Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678) that the painter’s nickname was taken from the name of the street where he lived. Bezzi matriculated as a painter at the Compagnia delle Quattro Arti in 1549, but we have no word of his career prior to 1558, when he was commissioned to paint decorations for a frieze in the house of Senator Camillo Bolognetti. These paintings do not survive, though Malvasia records that their subject was, fittingly, the history of Camillo. Concerning Bezzi’s style, Malvasia tells us, 'those few works by him that are known — and they are mostly frescos — are distinguished by their good colour, as with his master [Tibaldi] and are full of erudition. If they are not as perfect and studied [as those of Tibaldi], they are perhaps more powerful, singular, and resolute' (English translation from The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 147). Alongside Girolamo Mirola, Bezzi was apprenticed to Tibaldi, whose extravagant style must have had a profound influence on the young painter. Only two of the paintings Malvasia ascribes to Bezzi’s hand survive, namely the Madonna and Child with the Blessed Raniero and Saints Peter, Paul and Jerome in the Oratorio dei Battuti in the church of Santa Maria della Vita, painted in 1563, and the Circumcision of Christ in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, the latter of which was completed by Prospero Fontana following Bezzi’s death in 1571.