Palma Giovane

Paintings

Iacopo Nigreti (Venice, 1548/50[1] — October 14, 1628), best known as Jacopo Palma il Giovane or simply Palma Giovane ("Young Palma")[2] was a prolific and facile Venetian Mannerist painter. After Tintoretto's death (1594), Palma became Venice's dominant artist perpetuating his style.[3] Outside Venice, he received numerous commissions in the area of Bergamo, then part of the Venetian Domini di Terraferma, and in Central Europe, most prominently from the connoisseur emperor Rudolph II in Prague..

The heir of a sound family tradition, he was the great-nephew of the painter Palma Vecchio ("Old Palma") and the son of Antonio Nigreti (1510/15-1575/85), a minor painter who was himself the pupil of the elder Palma's workshop foreman Bonifazio de' Pitati[4] and who after Bonifazio's death (1553) inherited Bonifazio's shop and clientele; the younger Palma seems to have polished his style making copies after Titian.

In 1567 Guidobaldo II della Rovere, duke of Urbino, recognized Palma's talents, supporting him for four years and sending him to Rome, where he remained until about 1572. Shedding most remnants of Roman manner after his return to Venice, Palma adopted the inescapable models and mannerisms of Tintoretto. His early biographers assert that he found a place in the ageing Titian's workshop; when the master died, Palma stepped in to finish his last work, the Pietà in the Accademia, Venice. Palma's first major public commission arrived after a 1577 fire in the Doge's Palace: three scenes in its grand council hall. By the mid-1580s he had digested Tintoretto's versatile figure postures and Titian's thick surfaces, emphasis on light, and loose brushstroke. In Palma Giovane's output, Freedberg detects also "an occasional discursive opulence à la Veronese; and inclinations towards descriptive naturalism à la Bassano."[5]

Adding naturalism to his Mannerist style by the 1580s,[6] he varied the ingeniously synthesised amalgam according to subject matter and patrons' own eclectic and conservative tastes, with "virtuoso skill and a facile intelligence."[7].

After 1600 he painted mythologies for a small circle of intellectuals.

He was interred in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, a traditional burial place of the doges.

Notes

1. ^ Spelling and dates as in Sidney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, 3rd ed. (Yale University Press) 1993:560-62.
2. ^ "Jacopo Palma called Palma Giovane, in Federico Zeri, Italian Paiuntings (Metropoluitan Museum of Art), 1973:45.
3. ^ Freedberg characterises him among Venetian painters as "the only painter of this generation to exhibit a semblance of vitality, even within formulae based mostly upon Tintorettesque style." (Freedberg 1993:560).
4. ^ Bonifazio inherited the elder Palma's workshop in 1528; see Philip Cottrell, "The Artistic Parentage of Palma Giovane" The Burlington Magazine 144 No. 1190 (May 2002), pp. 289-291.
5. ^ Freedberg 1993:561.
6. ^ Freedberg notes in this context the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, S. Giacomo dell'Orio, Venice, before 1584, then more conspicuously in the histories of the Doge Pasquale Cicogna in the Oratorio dei Crociferi, 1586-87.
7. ^ Freedberg, eo. loc..