MASTELLETTA
Artist
(b. 1575, Bologna, d. 1655, Bologna)Details
Mastelletta (originally Giovanni Andrea Donducci), Italian painter. He trained under the Carracci, most notably Lodovico, but he also responded to the more expressive art of Pietro Faccini and Annibale Castelli. The spontaneity and freedom of his Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (Rome, Galleria Spada) emphasizes his closeness to these painters, while his Assumption of the Virgin (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) is closer to Ludovico Carracci's style, though with overtones of a Mannerist elegance that is characteristic of Mastelletta. Annibale Carracci died in 1609, and after 1610 Mastelletta went to Rome, where he probably turned to the group of artists around Adam Elsheimer, Carlo Saraceni and Agostino Tassi, all of whom painted landscapes enlivened by small, vivid figures. Mastelletta's Crossing of the Red Sea, Moses Parting the Waters, Fête Champetre and Soldiers on the March (all Rome, Galleria Spada) are the stylistically mature product of this relationship, yet they also reveal his responsiveness to Emilian Mannerist painters, among them Parmigianino, Jacopo Zanguidi, Giovanni Bertoia and, in particular, Niccolò dell'Abbate. In the same period Mastelletta painted 12 scenes from the Lives of Saints (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale), probably to adorn a Franciscan church. These feature larger figures but still retain the Mannerist insubstantiality apparent in the works in the Galleria Spada. Between 1613-1614, he contributed to the decoration of the chapel of St Dominic in the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna. He also frescoed the patron saints of Bologna on the pendentives of the dome. Malvasia describes him by the late 1620s as increasingly neurotic and reclusive. His figures have an almost phantasmagoric Alessandro Magnasco-like fervour, not characteristic of Bolognese classicism. He is also painted elaborate landscapes to his paintings, likely an influence of Scarsellino's and/or Niccolò dell'Abbate's works. Although Mastelletta's career is that of a seventeenth-century artist, he is strongly related to the sixteenth century in inspiration. His style was influenced by the most atypical Mannerist painters, and his oeuvre was one of the last expressions of "European Mannerism". It is this style and his visionary quality that define him as a singular artist, especially within the genre of Bolognese landscape painting of the beginning of the seventeenth century. //
| Category | Artists |
| Artists by letter | M |
| Artist nationality | Italian |