Simone Peterzano

Simone Peterzano occupies a fascinating position in the history of 16th-century Italian painting: he began his career as a pupil of the greatest Venetian colourist of the High Renaissance, Titian, and ended it as the master of the most influential painter of the Baroque, Caravaggio.

The dating of this work has varied from Gregori and Dal Pozzolo’s opinion that it was executed early on in Peterzano’s time in Milan, where he moved in 1572 and spent most of his career, to Frangi and Pavesi’s view that it should rather be placed earlier, well within the artist’s Venetian period. Pertinent to this latter argument is the composition of the painting, which harks back to the work of Venetian artists from the first decades of the sixteenth century, such as Palma il Vecchio and Bonifazio Veronese. The more dynamic figure of Saint John the Baptist reflects poses found in certain works by Jacopo Tintoretto, from a few decades later in the 1560s however, leading Frangi to propose a date of 1560-65 – a time when Peterzano was combining contemporary references with simpler, more archaic compositions, which contrast with the complexity of his later paintings.

Peterzano’s characteristically meticulous attention to detail, typical of Lombard painting and the works of artists such as fellow Bergamesque artist Bernardino Licinio, for example, is also evident and analogous with other paintings from this period, such as The Supper in Emmaus, today in the Galleria Palatina di Palazzo Pitti, Florence (inv. no. 88).¹ The illusionistic rendering of Saint Benedict’s tonsure and mitre here, for example, is prescient of the artist’s later influence on Caravaggio.

¹ http://catalogo.uffizi.it/it/29/ricerca/detailiccd/1188240/