Painting: In His Own Dialect

No one knows for sure when he was born, or even when he died. Historians passed him by, and the only accounts he left of his own life are nagging reminders of the difficulty he had collecting payment for his paintings. One can perhaps forgive his age for slighting Girolamo Romanino. It was, after all, in love with Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Michelangelo.

Sooner or later, eyes less jaded than his contemporaries’ were bound to notice Romanino. His frescoes fill the churches of Brescia, his home town in northern Italy, and the chapels and monasteries dotting the surrounding countryside. When city fathers saw the 400th anniversary of his death approaching—biographers guess that he died between 1560 and 1566—they thought it high time to give a boost to his reputation. With funds from Rome, they restored the town’s 11th century duomo and flooded its musty stone interior with fluorescent light; his paintings and frescoes were rounded up and mounted on great white panels. Now Brescia claims the handsomest exhibition ever (see color) of its own bright contribution to the Renaissance.

Rustic & Cantankerous. Romanmo probably studied in nearby Venice. His painting shows that he was conversant with that city’s greats, and when he chose, he could paint as splendrously as they—more than one of his pictures has been attributed to Giorgione or Titian. It was more characteristic of him to siphon his Biblical subjects through what a Brescia critic once described as “the rustic and cantankerous dialect of his own district.” The results were often warm and whimsical. Windows and archways open onto rocky landscapes typical of the region. His Saviour is not the emaciated, sublimely anguished figure of his colleagues, but pasta-fed and plump, his saints more spirited than spiritual. His chubby cherubs often pout like naughty children; in St. Anthony of Padua they hold up a garland from a lemon tree which then, as now, grew on the shores of nearby Lake Garda.

At other times, his painting reflects a mercurial temperament tinged with bitterness. He aimed to please—to a point. He included in St. Anthony the patron who was to donate the work to the church. Drawing the line at flattering the man, Romanino portrayed him, standing at the foot of the saint, as hawk-nosed, heavy-jowled and haughty.

Troubled & Sad. Crisp reminders of everyday reality shocked and estranged his 16th century public; he even got fired midway through work on frescoes for the duomo in Cremona. Today his inventive if taciturn brilliance is earning him increasing admiration. He is recognized more and more as a man of his time, for his canvases, above all, are a commingling of the shifting manners then stirring in the art world.

None shows this better than his masterpiece, the Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine. According to legend, Catherine was executed and borne heavenward by angels where her devotion was rewarded when, having refused many suitors, she was betrothed to the Infant Christ by the Virgin Mary. It should be a supremely happy occasion, but as Romanino portrays it, the scene is singularly lacking in heavenly joy. The skies are threatening, the nuns troubled, the Virgin sad, the Infant petulant. Miraculously wedding deep Venetian hues, Lombardian realism and Gothic expressionism, the painting seems a superb summation of that place and that moment when the brusque Angst-filled winds from the north began to cool the warmth of Italy’s golden age. The high Renaissance was poised before a modern world. Romanino knew it.