Francesco Rizzo di Bernardo da Santacroce (active from 1504 to 1545)
Madonna with Child, Saint Simon and Saint Catherine
Oil on panel, 44 x 61 cm
With frame, 65 x 79 cm
Santa Croce is a small village located in front of San Pellegrino Terme, on the hilly slopes beyond the Brembo river. This village was kept alive by some family groups such as the Galizzi (also called Rizzo or De Vecchi), the Oprandi, the Grazioli, the Micheli who then flowed towards other centers, such as Bergamo and Venice emptying the small village of Santa Croce. From here come about ten painters active from the beginning of the 16th century until the first quarter of the 17th, belonging to two distinct families that formed two workshops both operating in Venice.
One of these is the one started by Francesco di Simone who, having died in 1508, leaves the legacy to Francesco Rizzo di Bernardo, active from 1504 to 1545 helped by his brother Vincenzo. He is succeeded by perhaps his cousin Giovanni De Vecchi or Galizzi, documented in Venice until 1565.
The genealogy of the second workshop is more defined: it passes in fact from the father, Girolamo active from 1503 to 1556, to the son Francesco active between 1516 and 1584, and finally to the grandson Pietro Paolo di Francesco who died in 1620. Both workshops are active in Venice and its surroundings, expanding into the Brescia and Bergamo areas touching Istria and Dalmatia, often operating in collaboration with each other. Their works are characterized by compositional styles inspired by the great masters such as Giambellino, Cima da Conegliano, Titian, Cariani and Previtali and tend to repeat through the generations often making it difficult to distinguish the various personalities that animate the workshops.
The Madonna with Child and Saints Simeon and Catherine proposed here refers to undoubted Bellinian influences. The figures are depicted in half-length and crowd the space of the panel that opens onto a landscape background, only interrupted by a central panel against which the figure of the Virgin stands out.
The preciousness of the stroke is similar to that of the known works of Francesco Rizzo di Bernardo da Santacroce, especially if compared with the Madonna with Child between Saints Simon and Joseph at the Pinacoteca di Ravenna. The two works are equal in the compositional scheme and in the hieratic arrangement of the characters whose voluminousness of the bodies is hidden, if not flattened, by the clothes that cover them in favor of an almost graphic simplification of the same. Particularly fitting are the comparisons between the figures of Saint Simon and the Virgin, which repeat the same poses, as well as stringent are the analogies in the rendering of the draperies and their crumpling.
Francesco Rizzo, son of Bernardo, who carried out a modest activity, belonged to the De Vecchi family. The first news about him comes from 1505 in a document that mentions him as a witness, which indicates that at that date he must have already reached 18 years. In 1508 he inherited the workshop of his master Francesco di Simone. In 1518 he delivered a triptych to the Church of S. Maria in Serina, now dismembered but still existing. He appears again as a witness in a document of 1545 date after which he died.
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