Pietro da Cortona
From Freepedia
Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berettini) (November 1 1596- May 16, 1669) was a prolific High Baroque artist active mainly in Rome. Cortona is best known as a painter of frescoes, where he competed with Andrea Sacchi and others, but also as an architect, contemporary with Bernini and Borromini.
Cortona's panegyric tromp d'oiel extavaganzas have lost favor in our minimalist sardonic times; they are precursors of sunny and cherubim infested rococco excesses. They stand in stark contrast with darker renegade naturalism prominent in Caravaggisti, and reminds us that the Baroque was not a monolithic style. Cortona, like Bernini in sculpture, appears reactionary, patronizing; yet if excellence in art is measured by the ability to match style to intent within the limitations of the medium, then Cortona is triumphant. He was the first of the fresco painters that sought to dispense with the architectural roof by painting it away. While rising heavenward, these works, like the Barberini Allegory are meant to stagger and humble the visitor as if he (she) stood over, and not below, a looming abyss of mythic power, which threatens to overwhelm him (her).
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Painting
His first works were painted for the Sacchetti family and are now in the Capitoline Gallery, Rome, along with other works of his, but he was soon taken up by the powerful Barberini family - the family of Urban VIII - for whom he painted frescoes in the ancient church of Santa Bibiana , Rome (1624-1626).
Grand Salon of Palazzo Barberini
Fresco cycles were numerous in Cortona's Rome; most represented framed episodes imitating canvases such as found in the Sistine Chapel ceiling or in Carraccis' The Loves of the Gods in the Farnese gallery (completed 1601). In 1633, Pietro da Cortona began the fresco painting of ceiling of the Palazzo Barberini (now the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome). Completed six years later, the huge fresco represents a Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power. A sketch for it is now exhibited with it, but its authenticity is open to doubt. The fresco is an illusion with the central field apparently open to the sky and scores of figures seen 'al di Sotto in Su' apparently coming into the room itself or floating above it. Maffeo Barberini was Urban VIII. See [1][2]
Palazzo Pitti and others
Pietro also went to Florence and began a series of similar frescoes in the Palazzo Pitti [3]; he also painted the ceiling frescoes in the Oratorian Chiesa Nuova of Santa Maria in Vallicella [4], Rome, which was not finished until 1665. Other frescoes in Palazzo Pamphili.
Towards the end of his life he devoted much of his time to architecture, but he published a treatise on painting in 1652 under a pseudonym and in collaboration. He refused invitations to both France and Spain. With the help of numerous pupils, of whom Ciro Ferri was the most important, he painted many other frescoes and easel pictures in Rome and Florence.
Architectural Projects
Among Pietro's more important architectural projects are Santa Luca e Martina (completed in 1664) at the Forum Romanum, the exterior programme of the ancient Santa Maria della Pace (1656-1667), and the façade (with an unusual loggia) of Santa Maria in Via Lata (appr. 1660).
Anatomical plates
Prior to becoming famous as an architect, Pietro drew anatomical plates that would not be engraved and published until a hundred years after his death. The plates in Tabulae anatomicae are now thought to have been started around 1618. The dramatic and highly studied poses effected by the figures are in keeping with the style of other Renaissance Baroque anatomical artists, although nowhere does such an approach find any fuller expression than in these plates. See the plates at the University of Iowa website: [5]
