Verona (Italy) -- Description and travel; Verona (Italy) -- History
Before enlarging on them however it would be well to pause for a moment
to speak of Paolo Morando, better known as Cavazzola, who was absolutely
distinct from Liberale and Girolamo dai Libri, though living and
working at the same time and in the same city. He was born at Verona in
1486, and died when only thirty-six years old. His early death cut short
a career of great promise, for Cavazzola had little in common with the
simple grave manner of the early Veronese masters, he moved along lines
of his own creating, and showed as Burckhardt says in speaking of him a
“transition from the realism of the fifteenth century to the noble free
character of the sixteenth.” As a colourist Cavazzola is cold and hard;
and though his tints are glowing as to brilliancy there is little in
them that delights the eye or excites pathos or devotion. His drawing
though is vigorous, his touch free, untrammelled and broad, with a power
and grasp of treatment that caused his contemporaries to speak of him as
the Veronese Raphael. Very fine are a series of his pictures, five in
number, which treat of the Passion of our Lord in the gallery at Verona.
There is in them a serious conception as to composition and vigour in
the technique that cause one to realise a master’s thought and
execution, and to feel what possibilities lay within his grasp when
death cut short his career. Nearly all Cavazzola’s work is in Verona,
though the National Gallery possesses two examples, and one is to be
found at Dresden.
To return to Liberale’s pupils, Francesco Bonsignori, also called
Francesco da Verona, is one of the first, being born at Verona in 1455.
His early education, begun in his native town, was continued at Mantua,
where he was patronised by the Gonzaghi, and where Mantegna’s influence
developed his style considerably. He is chiefly known as a portrait
painter, a fact that impressed Cosmo Monkhouse, who, ignoring or
forgetting Torbido’s work in the same direction, speaks thus of
Bonsignori: “At Verona, alone almost of all the cities of Italy, there
seems to have been little demand for portraits. It produced no portrait
painter of eminence, and though the fact does not prove much, it may be
noted that the only fine portrait by a Veronese in the National Gallery
(that by Bonsignori), is of a Venetian Senator.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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