Mauro Pavesi

The Dominican church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan houses an important fresco cycle in the Marliani family chapel, which was previously ascribed to artists such as Ottavio Semino, Aurelio Luini and Francesco Nappi. Now that a set of newly rediscovered mural paintings in Selvanesco have been attributed to Giovanni Battista Della Rovere, called Fiammenghino (1561-1627), it is possible to recognize the same hand in the Santa Maria delle Grazie frescoes...

A revision of Fede Galizia’s portraiture activity may reconsider the comparison between the image of the Milanese memorialist Paolo Morigia (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan; signed and dated 1598) and a misterious Falconer kept in the Koelliker Collection (inv. LK00062). the two paintings share the same combination of miniaturistic passages and brutal, realistic representation of male uglyness. the way the tissues, eye wrinkles, complexions and structures of the skull and nose are painted is, on the other hand, very similar...

A Newly Discovered St. John the Baptist in the Desert from the Caravaggesque period of Giuseppe Vermiglio MAURO PAVESI The surveys for the cataloguing of the works of Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana brought to the discovery, among the most recent acquisitions, of a previously unknown St. John the Baptist by Giuseppe Vermiglio, which presents the same relaxed, calm pose of the painting of the same subject made by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and now part of the collection of Musei Capitolini in Rome. The artwork, never mentioned in the specific literature, came through a donation to its present location in 2007, with the attribution to an anonymous 17th- Century Emilian painter; a number of glaring stylistic and structural similarities undoubtedly confirm the attribution to Vermiglio. The derivation from that specific Caravaggio original, painted in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei – and also known through a replica documented in the Pamphili collection since the late 17th Century – adds a new piece to the reconstruction of the Roman acquaintances in the Lombard artist’s early career, after the notorious traces of his relationship with the Barberini and Giustiniani families, as demonstrated, respectively, by the many replicas Vermiglio had taken from Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac in the Barberini collection, and by the Coronation of Thorns at Palazzo Altieri, derived from another painting by Merisi, formerly part of the noteworthy collection of Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The possible date of Vermiglio’s newly discovered painting should not be extremely late, given the obvious derivation from Caravaggio, which suggests a not quite distant impression from the direct view of Merisi’s masterpieces; nonetheless, a clear classicist reduction of the model and the normalization of its iconography – typical elements of Vermiglio’s late Milanese works – seem to suggest a date near his return to Lombardy (documented since 1621).