The 'Master of the Kress Landscapes' Unmasked: Giovanni Larciani and the Fucecchio Altar-Piece

• Autores: Louis Alexander Waldman
• Localización: Burlington magazine, ISSN 0007-6287, Vol. 140, Nº 1144, 1998, págs. 456-469
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ever since his oeuvre was constructed over thirty-five years ago by Federico Zeri, the painter known as the 'Master of the Kress Landscapes' has been recognised as one of the most idiosyncratic and intriguing painters of the Florentine maniera - and one of its most perplexing enigmas.' Taking his Notname from three landscape spalliere now in the National Gallery in Washington (Fig.20), the so-called 'Kress Master' is the author of some twenty pictures, which reveal a vigorously imaginative and wholly individual style distinguished by a nervously calligraphic and occasionally awkward draughtsmanship, offset by a vibrant palette and richly sensuous impasto. As his pseudonym suggests, the 'Kress Master' often filled the backgrounds of his pictures with intensely beautiful landscapes, typically combining dramatic Dureresque ter- rains, forlorn crags or fantastic cities and lanky, angular figures sketched with a confident, lightning-swift brush. Scholars, taking their lead from stylistic influences detected in his work, have conjecturally identified this anonymous Mannerist with various of the nomi senza quadrimentioned by Vasari.2 But thanks to three recently discovered contracts for the artist's most important work - his dated altar-piece of 1523 in the Museo Civico of Fucecchio (Fig. 19) - the master can at last be securely identified and given the foundations of a biography." He is revealed as a Florentine painter by the name of Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani (1484-1527), who does not even receive a passing mention from Vasari. Taking the contracts as a starting point, it has also been possible to clarify the problematic iconography of the Fucecchio altar- piece and to reconstruct the circumstances of the commission. In addition, questions can now be posed about the painter's artistic formation and his place in early Cinquecento Florentine art.