PALMA GIOVANE
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1548-1628
Son of Antonio Palma. A greater artist than his father, his vast oeuvre represents the impact of central Italian Mannerism but principally of Jacopo Tintoretto on Venetian painting in the generation after Titian, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. He died in his late seventies and was occasionally referred to as 'il vecchio', but since the 17th century he has been known as 'il giovane' to distinguish him from his great uncle. He was virtually self-taught, apart from a presumed acquaintance with his father's workshop. In 1567 he came to the attention of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who was to support him for four years. A possible knowledge of Federico Barocci's art at the court of Urbino left little trace on his surviving early works. The Duke sent him to Rome for study, where he spent a few months apprenticed to an unknown artist. There his sympathy was with Taddeo Zuccaro and Federico Zuccaro, who influenced the graphic style of the drawing of Matteo da Lecce (1568; New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.), his first dated work. His Roman sojourn, which lasted until c. 1573-4, made a direct impact on some of his Venetian works and indirectly made him receptive to Tintoretto's style. A tendency in Rome in the 1560s to retreat from the most artificial and decorative aspects of Mannerism in favour of naturalism was also to affect Palma's attitude to style in his mature works
ID: 63830 The Pool 1592 Oil on canvas Collezione Molinari Pradelli, Castenaso St John's version (John 5:1-15) of the miracle of the healing of the paralytic lays the scene in Jerusalem at the pool of Bethesda. (According to Matthew, Mark and Luke it took place at Kapernaum.) The place was a resort of the sick since the waters were believed to have miraculous curative powers. It was said that from time to time an angel, traditionally the archangel Gabriel, came and disturbed the water and that the first person to enter it afterwards was healed. But the paralytic had never succeeded in being first. Christ came there and found him. He was ordered to take up his bed and walk and immediately found himself cured. John described it as 'a place with five colonnades', and therefore represented with some such architectural feature. Christ addressing the paralytic who lies at the edge of the pool. Others, sick and infirm crowd the scene. Palma's painting was clearly inspired by the great examples of sixteenth-century Venetian art and in particular by the works of Tintoretto. The composition is typical of Palma the Younger's mature style. Compositional flair, the employment of diagonal perspectives and rich colours almost obliterated by heavy shadow as well as the theatrical eloquence of the gestures and use of foreshortening are all typical characteristics of Palma the Younger's style of painting. When he managed to control all of them, as in this splendid example, he took post-Renaissance Venetian painting, generally considered a dismal period in art, to its highest degree of effectiveness and expression. When, on the other hand, the effects he used degenerated into repetitive formulas, seventeenth-century Venetian art very quickly became monotonous. This painting is a part of the Collezione Molinari Pradelli, the most extensive private collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art in Italy.Artist:PALMA GIOVANE Title: The Pool Painted in 1551-1600 , Italian - - painting : religious
