Giovanni Ambrogio Bevilacqua, called Liberale

The Rectory of Saint Gregory the Great, New York, acquired by Dr. William F. Hughes (Pastor of Saint Gregory's from 1917-1929), until at least 1972;

With Stanley Moss, New York;

By whom anonymously sold, New York, Sotheby's, 24 January 2008, lot 219;

There acquired by the present collector. 

Giovanni Ambrogio Bevilaqua's career was spent in his native Lombardy, producing frescoes, altarpieces and easel pictures for patrons in and around Milan. He was one of the artists active there at the time of Leonardo's arrival, circa 1482/3. His style, however, appears to have been immune to the Florentine's innovations, and rather he turned to Vincenzo Foppa as an example; as he developed as an artist it is clear that other painters also made an impact on him, including Bergognone and the Master of the Pala Sforzesca.  

This impressive, large-scale Christ on the Road to Calvary, in fact, exhibits these differing influences. It relates in composition to a small panel of very similar composition formerly in the Suida-Manning collection, and now in the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas. Righi, in an in-depth article attempting to create a chronology for Bevilacqua's corpus of work, notes that despite the similarity of the two pictures, they were painted at different moments in the artist's career. The present, large panel likely dates from the mid-1480's, about the same time as one of his few securely dated works, a series of frescoes in the church of San Vittore in Landriano, which are signed and dated 1485. This was the artist's most strictly "Foppesque" moment, with solidly modeled and strongly drawn figures. The Suida-Manning picture, however, dates to a later moment, 1490-95, when the artist began to feel the influence of other artists, such as the Pala Sforsesca Master; it clearly relies on the present painting for its composition, and is painted in a more graphic manner and with variations in number of ways, suggesting that it must have been a redaction by the artist, painted for a specific purpose or patron, rather than a ricordo.