The painting we are presenting has a well-known subject, of consolidated sacred iconographic tradition: the Nativity.
What makes the painting original, however, is the overwhelming novelty of the artist's language, through a series of data that can be identified at first glance and that suggest an approach and attribution to the school of the painter Girolamo Romani, known as Romanino (Brescia 1484-1566).
In fact, in our Nativity, we are faced with a not at all negligible novelty of language, which fully reflects the descriptive terms reserved for Romanino by Angelo Piazzoli: "the painter of the conscious anti-classical rupture, an impetuous experimenter of a mixture in which the Milanese perspective culture, the colors and moods of the Venetian lagoon, Gothic and grotesque traits of Dürer's derivation, and the typically Lombard concreteness of attention to truth boil. All always animated by an inner impulse of urgent religiosity" (A. Piazzoli, F. Larovere, Girolamo Romanino, the restless witness, Bergamo 9-30 October 2015).
For a long time, in fact, regarding Romanino, there has been talk of "anti-classicism" and "ungrammatical language," two conditions equally recognizable in our painting, direct elements of specularity and comparison with Romanino's "stylistic plurilingualism," so celebrated by Testori, who particularly draws attention, in this regard, to artist's "peripheral" experience in Valcamonica (frescoes of Pisogne and Bieno), where Romanino, with overflowing impetuosity, subverts the linguistic codes of classicism and mannerism.
These peripheral contexts, in which "the history of a popular humanity throbs, in the rustic, and sometimes ungainly, physicality of the bodies and in the humble simplicity of the clothes" (A. Piazzoli, Ibidem) finds echo and correspondence in our painting, in which nothing is granted to the hieratic Renaissance composure or to the visionary and spiritualizing transformation of Mannerist forms.
In this sense, the words of Dell'Acqua, superintendent of the Galleries for Lombardy, who wanted the Brescia conference in 1965 precisely to understand fully "to what extent Romanino's art speaks to the conscience, to the sensitivity of today," making him our contemporary, contemporary to a restlessness defined by Guttuso as "romantic" and in which "the so proclaimed stylistic inequalities belong to those who seek."
The authenticity of the item is certificated with photos and documents
Dimensions : 47x 34 panel
Frame : 70 x60
