Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (born c. 1480, Brescia, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died c. 1548, Venice?) was a painter of the Brescian school whose style is marked by a quiet lyricism. Although his work was largely forgotten after his death, interest in Savoldo was revived in the 20th century and his work gained a place alongside that of other High Renaissance painters.

The first records of Savoldo’s life show he was in Parma in 1506 and was recorded in the guild at Florence in 1508. Little else is known of his personal life except that he may have left Venice, where he spent most of his life, to live in Milan for a few years and that he had a Flemish wife through whom he may have made Northern contacts. Scholars have found it difficult to pinpoint Savoldo’s training and artistic influences because his style changed very little during his career. His preoccupation with clearly defined shapes in light suggests he was influenced by Cima da Conegliano, who also used light with quiet exactitude and who may have also been based in Parma in 1506. Savoldo also may have been influenced by Flemish painters.

Savoldo’s use of deep, rich colour gives his paintings dramatic tonal values. The influence of Giorgione can be felt in the dreamy, poeticized treatment in such works as Portrait of a Knight (c. 1525). Savoldo defined his luminous, meticulously detailed figures by setting them against darkened, twilit skies, a technique that culminated in Saint Matthew and the Angel (1530–35) and St. Mary Magdalene Approaching the Sepulchre (c. 1535). The portrait long known as Gaston de Foix (c. 1532), but no longer identified with that duke of Nemours, attempted to give a sense of three-dimensionality by depicting a figure wearing a suit of armour reflected in a mirror.

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Savoldo liked to depict unusual effects of light, and he paid particular attention to reflected or nocturnally lit scenes. His output was small (only about 40 paintings), and he had little influence on the course of Venetian painting, from which he had always stood somewhat aloof. For centuries after his death his work was typically either ignored or wrongly attributed to other artists, but in the early 20th century it was revived by art critics who grouped him, for the first time, with the High Renaissance artists. Exhibitions of his paintings followed, and a 1990 retrospective of his work, held in Brescia and Frankfurt am Main, continued to revitalize his reputation.