Artibus et Historiae no. 55 (XXVIII)

2007, ISSN 0391-9064

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MAURIZIO MARINI - The Death of Procris and Other Unpublished Works by Polidoro da Caravaggio

Having dedicated a monographic study to Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio (1499-1543; cf. M. Marini, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio - l'invidia e la fortuna, Venice, 2005), I was able to find out, how the biographical data concerning that artist - the pupil of Giovanni da Udine and collaborator of Raphael, born in Caravaggio in Lombardy - in the light of lack of biographical information on Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), another great painter from Caravaggio, has been used (for quite different reasons) as a kind of a literary "filler" for the biography of the latter.

Therefore, the present paper has sought to settle that confusion and to give back each of the two Lombard artists their due. Moreover, since the research on autograph works of Polidoro was not exhausted with the above-mentioned book, but rather the publication of the book became a further incentive to the research, I thought it opportune to reconsider some aspects of Poliodoro's art, taking as a starting point his important unpublished work, the Death of Procris, and to add to it, in the same respect, the two panels with St. Andrew and St. Thaddeus - probably parts of a dismembered "apostolado", painted at the time when the artist was in Messina - as well as two "putti-caryatids against landscape background", stylistically still dominated by classicizing traits of Raphaellesque etymology.