Domenico di Pace Beccafumi
(1486–May
18,
1551)
was an
Italian
Renaissance-Mannerist
painter
active predominantly in
Siena.
He is considered one of the last undiluted representatives
of the
Sienese school
of painting.
Domenico was born in
Montaperti,
near
Siena,
the son of Giacomo di Pace, a peasant who worked on the
estate of Lorenzo Beccafumi. Seeing his talent for drawing,
Lorenzo adopted him, and commended him to learn painting
from Mechero, a lesser Sienese artist.
In
1509
he travelled to Rome, but soon returned to Siena, and while
the Roman forays of two Sienese artists of roughly his
generation (Il
Sodoma and
Peruzzi)
had imbued them with elements of the Umbrian-Florentine
Classical style, Beccafumi's style remains, in striking
ways, provincial. In Siena, he painted religious pieces for
churches and of mythological decorations for private
patrons, only mildly influenced by the gestured
Mannerist
trends dominating the neighboring
Florentine school.
There are medieval eccentricities, sometimes phantasmagoric,
superfluous emotional detail and a misty non-linear, often
jagged quality to his drawings, with primal tonality to his
coloration that separates him from the classic Roman
masters.
Compared to the equilibrated,
geometric, and self-assured Florentine style, the Sienese
style of painting, edges into a more irrational and
emotionally-unbalanced world. Buildings are often transected
and perspectives awkward. The setting is often
hallucinogenic; the colors, discordant. For example, in the
Nativity (San
Martino, Siena) hovering
angels form an architectural hoop, figures enter from the
shadows of a ruined arch. In his Annunciation, the
Virgin resides in a world neither in day or dusk, she and
the Angel Gabriel shine while the house is in shambles. In
Christ in Limbo (Pinacoteca, Siena), an atypically
represented topic, Christ sways in contraposto as he enters
a netherworld of ruins and souls. S.J. Freedberg, compares
his vibrant eccentric figures to those of the Florentine
mannerist
contemporary
Rosso Fiorentino
yet more "optical and fluid". While all the elements of the
expected religious scenes are here, it is like a play in
which all the actors have taken atypical costumes, and
forgotten some of their lines.
In Medieval Italy,
Siena
had been an artistic, economic, and political rival of
Florence;
but wars and natural disasters caused a decline by the
15th century.
Beccafumi's style is among the last in a line of Sienese
artists, a medieval believer of miracles awaking in
Renaissance reality.
