Portrait of Alda Gambara, c. 1515 – 1516
Oil on panel
60 x 50 cm
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
Altobello Melone (c. 1490–1491 — before 3 May 1543) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. His work merges Lombard and Mannerist styles. He was commissioned in December 1516 to fresco the Cathedral of Cremona, work which continued till 1518. His contract required that his frescoes be more beautiful than his predecessor, Boccaccio Boccaccino. He worked alongside Giovanni Francesco Bembo and Paolo da Drizzona.[
Melone contributed frescoes to the Cathedral of Cremona in 1516. The Lamentation in the Brera comes in all probability from the church of Saint Lorenzo in Brescia and dated 1512. The stylistic convergence with Romanino is particularly obvious, such that the contemporary Venetian Marcantonio Michiel describes the Cremonese painter as a disciple of Armanin.
Moreover, in his masterpiece frescoes, Melone aims to be an interpreter of the anticlassicismo and “expressionist” language emerging in the work of Romanino. The seven scenes realized by Altobello evince a new forcefulness — Massacre of the Innocents is emblematic and manifest in the gestures and in the grotesque transformation of the faces. More on Altobello Melone
Saint Alda, (c. 1249 — c. 1309), was born in Siena, the daughter of the noble Pedro Francisco Ponzi and Inês Bulgarini, whom God had shown in a dream that he had chosen the child for Himself…
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Zaidan Gallery 