La riscoperta di Colantonio

• Autores: Pierluigi Leone de Castris
• Localización: Confronto: studi e ricerche di storia dell'arte europea, ISSN 1721-6745, Nº. 2, 2019, págs. 43-65
• Idioma: italiano
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• Resumen

  • Colantonio, the greatest Neapolitan painter of the fifteenth century, has remained a vague and mythical figure, a real ghost, until the first decades of the twentieth century. The misleading effect of the seventeenth century guides on Naples together with the "Vita" that De Dominici dedicated to him (1742-45) did not help to focus on the problem, also because the only useful source to get to know the artist, that is Pietro Summonte's letter to Marcantonio Michiel (1524), was barely known until that date.

    It is only in 1925 that Colantonio comes to be really known and becames a first and well-defined basis to an understanding of fifteenth-century Neapolitan painting, thanks to the first printed and commented publication of Summonte's letter by Fausto Niccolini, and then in 1950 with the essay "Il maestro di San Giovanni da Capestrano" by Ferdinando Bologna, which is here proposed again.

    A new critical interpretation of this essay after seventy years is an attempt to argue again and essentially confirm, even against recent years debates, the overall layout proposed by Bologna, on the basis of Tutini's manuscript (1660-66), of the large two-register altarpiece with "Saint Francis delivering the Rule " and "Saint Jerome in his studio", once in San Lorenzo Maggiore and now in the Museum of Capodimonte. It is identified, besides, a rare preparatory drawing for this first and most important painting by Colantonio (1444-46 ca.) held in the Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf.