Bartolomeo SCHEDONI
Modena 1578 - Parma 1615
Biography
The Emilian artist Bartolomeo Schedoni had a brief career of only about fifteen years, working mainly at the courts of the Este in Modena and the Farnese in Parma, and his oeuvre has been described by one modern scholar as ‘among the most impressive manifestations of the legacy of Correggio in Parma and the Carracci reform movement in Bologna.’ His earliest years as an artist were spent under the patronage of Duke Ranuccio I Farnese in Parma, who sent the young Schedoni to study with Federico Zuccaro in Rome. Back in Parma by 1597, Schedoni was again employed by the Farnese court but also painted an Adoration of the Magi for a convent in his birthplace of Modena. A chronology of his career is difficult to determine, however, since only a handful of paintings by the artist can be securely dated. Between 1602 and 1607 Schedoni lived and worked in Modena, where he received commissions from Duke Cesare d’Este and decorated the Sala del Vecchio Consiglio, or council chamber, of the Palazzo del Comune. By the end of 1607 Schedoni had returned to Parma, and the court of Ranuccio Farnese. He died in 1615, possibly by his own hand, at the age of thirty-seven.
Drawings by Bartolomeo Schedoni are quite rare, as was already noted by the 18th century French connoisseur and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette in 1741. (This may be partly due to the fact that, apart from the decoration of the Palazzo del Comune in Modena in 1607, Schedoni did not work on large-scale decorations or other projects which would have required numerous preparatory studies.) As a draughtsman, he worked mainly in chalk or brush, but only rarely seems to have used pen and ink. Schedoni’s chalk studies reflect the particular influence of the red chalk drawings of one of the artist’s illustrious predecessors in Parma, Correggio. His own drawings were in turn to prove influential on the draughtsmanship of such later artists as Giovanni Lanfranco and Guercino.