Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (orBeltraffio) (1466 or 1467[1] – 1516) was an Italian painter of theHigh Renaissance fromLombardy, who worked in the studio ofLeonardo da Vinci.[2] Boltraffio andBernardino Luini are the strongest artistic personalities to emerge from Leonardo's studio. According toGiorgio Vasari, he was of an aristocratic family and was born inMilan.
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio,Portrait of a Boy as Saint Sebastian
His major painting of the 1490s is theResurrection (painted with fellow da Vinci pupilMarco d'Oggiono and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). AMadonna and Child in theMuseo Poldi Pezzoli of Milan, is one of the high points of the LombardQuattrocento.
His portraits, often in profile, and his half-length renderings of theMadonna and Child are Leonardesque in conception, though the clean hard edges of his outlines lack Leonardo'ssfumato.
InBologna, where he remained in 1500-1502, he found sympathetic patrons in the Casio family, of whom he painted several portraits and for whom he produced his masterwork, thePala Casio for the Church of the Misericordia (Louvre Museum); it depicts aMadonna and Child with John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian and two KneelingDonors, Giacomo Marchione de' Pandolfi da Casio and his son, the Bolognese poet Girolamo Casio,[3] who mentioned Boltraffio in some of hissonnets. Boltraffio's portrait of Girolamo Casio is at thePinacoteca di Brera, Milan. HisPortrait of a Man in Profile is in theNational Gallery, London.
The standard monograph is Maria Teresa Fiorio,Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio: Un pittore milanese nel lume di Leonardo. (Milan and Rome) 2000.
A portrait probably depicting Girolamo CasioSalvator Mundi, c.1500, after restoration
Portrait of a Young Woman with a Scorpion Chain,Columbia Museum of Art. Formerly assigned to the Louvre's Master of theVierge aux Balances, the handsomePortrait of a Young Woman with a Scorpion Chain now in the Samuel H. Kress Collection of the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC has been reattributed to the hand of Boltraffio and dated to the period 1490-1505. Whether or not Leonardo participated in its design remains uncertain.[4]
TheSalvator Mundi from the workshop of Leonardo was attributed wholly to Boltraffio up to 2011 and some scholars continued to believe he contributed to it.[7] By 2017 however, the consensus in the art world was that it was a Leonardo da Vinci work,[8][9] although art historian Matthew Landrus maintained that the master contributed only about five to 20% of the painting with assistants such as Bernardino Luini producing the balance.[10] Carmen Bambach of theMetropolitan Museum of Art however, continued to maintain that the work was mostly painted by Boltraffio with "small retouchings" by the master.[11]
Mack, Charles R.,European Art in the Columbia Museum of Art including the Samuel H. Kress Collection. Volume I: the Thirteenth through the Sixteenth Century, Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press,2009, cat. #19, pp. 135–39.
Media related toGiovanni Antonio Boltraffio at Wikimedia Commons
