Circle of Jacopo Zanguidi, called BERTOIA
(Parma 1544 - Parma(?) c.1573)
Battle Scene
Pen and brown ink and brown wash.
Laid down on an old (18th century?) mount, inscribed Perin del vaga at the bottom.
129 x 211 mm. (5 x 8 1/4 in.)
Laid down on an old (18th century?) mount, inscribed Perin del vaga at the bottom.
129 x 211 mm. (5 x 8 1/4 in.)
Thought to have been a student of Lorenzo Sabatini in Bologna, the Parmese painter Jacopo Bertoia became a leading member of the late Renaissance or Mannerist style that had become firmly established in his native city, in the previous generation, by the local painter Francesco Maria Mazzola, known as Parmigianino. Although Parmigianino had died a few years before Bertoia was born, the work of the elder artist remained a very strong influence on him throughout his relatively brief career of about a decade. This is already evident in Bertoia’s first known work, a fresco of The Coronation of the Virgin for the façade of the Palazzo Comunale in Parma, painted in 1566. By the late 1560s Bertoia was in the service of the Farnese family. Among his most significant works were the decoration of a number of rooms in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma for Duke Ottavio Farnese, although there is some debate as to whether the design of two of the rooms, the Sala del Bacio and the Sala di Orfeo, long regarded as Bertoia’s masterpieces as a fresco painter, is in fact due to the Bolognese painter Girolamo Mirola (d.1570). In Rome Bertoia participated in the fresco decoration of the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome, on which a team of artists worked between 1569 and 1576, and the Palazzo Capodiferro, while for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese he decorated several rooms in the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, succeeding Federico Zuccaro.