The Renaissance in Ferrara took off from the lordship of Lionello d’Este (1441 – 1450) and produced some of the most original results in the early Italian Renaissance. This is the renowned school of Cosmé Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de ‘Roberti. A second school started in the sixteenth century, starring Dosso Dossi.
Historical and cultural context
The Este court in Ferrara was one of the most vital in northern Italy since the end of the fourteenth century, when Niccolò d’Este started the University and started the construction of the castle . The courtly connotations were strong, as shown by the interest in the fable world of medieval heritage, witnessed by the numerous romances that enriched the famous library, towards astrology and esotericism . On the artistic level, Pisanello was much appreciated, who made various medals for Lionello d’Este, and the illuminated production was international, in which stood Belbello da Pavia (author of the Niccolò d’Este Bible), and updated to humanism, such as that of Taddeo Crivelli (Borso d’Este Bible) .
With Leonello d’Este in power (from 1441 to 1450) the cultural horizons of the court widened further, ranging from all the new ferments and contributing to create a totally singular environment on the Italian scene. Educated by the humanist Guarino Veronese, he was in contact with the main artistic personalities of the time, including in addition to the aforementioned Pisanello, there were Leon Battista Alberti, Jacopo Bellini, Piero della Francesca (from about 1448) and the young Andrea Mantegna (in city in 1449 and 1450 -1451). He also started an antiques collection and a tapestry factory, which created close and continuous relationships with Flanders : in Ferrara, some great transalpine masters stayed in Ferrara, like Rogier van der Weyden (around 1450) and Jean Fouquet (towards 1447, leaving the Portrait of the buffoon Gonella) . The works of these authors were admired in the march collections by Italian artists passing through, allowing contact between the two great pictorial schools.
Painting
It was during the era of Borso d’Este (in power from 1450 to 1471) that the many artistic ferments of the court were transformed into a peculiar style, especially in painting. The basic stimuli were the courtly culture, the perspective rationality and the limpid light of Piero della Francesca, the optical attention to detail of the Flemish painters and the donatellism, filtered through the squarcioneschi. To this the Ferrarese artists soon added a peculiar interpretation of them, characterized by linear tension, expressive exasperation, preciousness combined with strong expressiveness .
The Studiolo of Belfiore
The birth of the Ferrara school, with its peculiar language, can be found in the surviving decorations of the Studiolo di Belfiore, commissioned by Lionello but completed at the time of Borso, already in the disappearance ” Delizia ” of Belfiore. The decoration consisted of marquetry of Lendinara and a cycle of paintings by Muse on board, lost or destroyed after the disappearance of the building .
Among the most representative tables, Thalia by Michele Pannonio is stylistically linked to the international gothic style, with a slim and elegantly screwed figure, underlined by slippery profiles that break though in the sharp drapery of the knee, while the exuberant spatiality of the seat and the whimsical decorative wealth, with an antique taste, recalling the Paduan Renaissance .
Polymnia instead, already attributed to Francesco del Cossa and now considered an anonymous Ferrarese, instead shows a clear debt to the ways of Piero della Francesca, with a solemn and synthetic plant, which stands out on a clear open landscape .
In the Calliope of Cosmè Tura, on the other hand, there are already stimuli which, reassembled in an original way, were at the base of the Ferrara school : solid and prospectively careful construction, with a lowered point of view, and an unbridled imagination in the description of the throne, with a free elements derived from the Paduan lesson of Francesco Squarcione, but highlighted by the light incident to a surreal tension .
Cosmè Tura
The founder of the Ferrara school is considered Cosmè Tura, which was joined by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de ‘Roberti. Despite their individual differences, their works are united by their preference for precious and refined images , sharp profiles, incisive chiaroscuro that makes each material as embossed metal or hard stone .
The style of Tura can be read in all its originality and complexity in the work of the doors of the organ of the Cathedral of Ferrara, painted in 1469. When open they show an Annunciation, when Saint George and the princess closed. In the Annunciation the solemn architecture of the background, which mentions the old, recalls Andrea Mantegna, as well as the “stone” drapery or the presence, in the landscape, of stratified rocky spurs. At the same time there are details of great naturalism and references to the courtly world, as in the bas-reliefs under the arches depicting the Planets, all fused and reworked with an extraordinary inspiration. The side ofSan Giorgio, on the other hand, is characterized by unbridled dynamism, made even more expressive by sharp and sharp edges, graphic highlights and the extreme expressionism that distorts the faces of men and animals .
Francesco del Cossa
Francesco del Cossa, a little younger than the Tura, started from a common base to his colleague, but he came to different results because of the greater emphasis given to the lesson of Piero della Francesca, with more composed and solemn figures. His participation in the Belfiore studio is not certain, but he participated in the other great essay of Ferrarese painting, the Salone dei Mesi in Palazzo Schifanoia (1467 – 1470). Several painters worked on this complex cycle of frescoes, probably directed by Cosmè Tura, based on an iconographic program by Pellegrino Priscianorich in astronomical, philosophical and literary references. Originally, the decoration consisted of twelve sectors, one per month, of which seven remain today. Each sector is divided into three sections: a higher one where the triumph of the patron god of the month is depicted, surrounded by the “sons” involved in typical activities, a central with a blue background with the zodiac sign and three “deans”, and a lower one with scenes that revolve around the figure of Borso d’Este. Celebrating the Lord and his ideals celebrated the entire state in its various functions, ranging from representation to government .
For example, Francesco del Cossa was held for the month of March, characterized by solid and synthetic forms, bright color and careful care in the perspective construction, which also came to order the rocks of the background, with imaginatively visionary shapes. To the almost crystallized forms of Cosmè Tura, Francis contrasted a more natural human representation .
Ercole de ‘Roberti
The third protagonist of the Ferrara school is Ercole de ‘Roberti, also active in the Salone dei Mesi. September is attributed to him, where the shapes undergo a geometric stylization (as in the rocks) and the figures assume such dynamism, thanks to the tense and angular outlines, to make everything anti-naturalistic, but of great expressive violence .
His are also the tables with the Stories of St. Vincent Ferrer (1473, Pinacoteca Vaticana), where we see an evolution: if the architecture appears more organized rationally, remain the broken contours of the figures, the draped draping with force and the dreamlike landscapes, which on the whole are suited to the snaking concerns in the period, which led to a crisis of Renaissance ideals at the end of the century .
Finally, a very different arrival point was the Pala Portuense (1479 – 1481), for the church of Santa Maria in Porto near Ravenna, where the expressionistic tensions are relegated to some bas-reliefs on the base of the Virgin’s throne, while the general sentiment it is granted to a calm and balanced harmony, with symmetrical correspondences in the colors. Everything is however also enlivened by the vertiginous architecture of the throne, which leaves room for a panorama open at the base (where it alludes to the mythical foundation of the church) with columns where the marble is rendered with extraordinary luministic sensitivity .
The sixteenth century
The generation of the fifteenth-century masters was exhausted in the nineties of the century, without an artistic change of another level: the fruits of the Ferrara school had been incorporated above all elsewhere, so at the beginning of the new century the Este took under their protective wing artists of more varied formation, updated to the novelties of the Roman and Venetian Renaissance .
The dominated figures of court painting in this period were the Garofalo, Ludovico Mazzolino and, above all, Dosso Dossi. The presence of great scholars such as Ludovico Ariosto favored a climate of fantastic evocation, which is perceived above all in the extraordinary study of Alfonso II d’Este, the Alabaster Camerini, destroyed in 1598. The decoration, directed by Dossi, included a series of extraordinary paintings by Baccanali, made by various artists including Giovanni Bellini and, above all, Tiziano. The same Dosso resumed by Tiziano some stylistic elements such as the chromatic richness and the wide openings of the landscape, to which he added a fluid and lively style rich in inventiveness, above all in the literary and mythological subjects. Some of his mythological motifs still foster inspiration for the Emilian painters of the early seventeenth century as Annibale Carracci .
Another appreciated Ferrarese painter was Lorenzo Costa, who became a court painter in Mantua after the disappearance of Mantegna.
The second half of the century, with the disappearance of Dosso and the end of the great grand-ducal commissions, maintained a certain vitality in the presence of the Filippi family, in which Sebastiano stood out, aka Bastianino, author of a universal Judgment of clear Michelangelesque ancestry in the apse of the Cathedral of Ferrara. Later the local school benefited from Carlo Bononi, but with the annexation to the State of the Church and the transfer of the Estense capital to Modena, Ferrara lost the role of artistic center of reference. The end of an era was sealed by the dismantling of alabaster dressing rooms(1598), whose decorations, brought to Rome, ended up being dispersed and are now found in various museums .
Architecture and urban planning
Already in 1443 Leon Battista Alberti stayed in the city, asked by Lionello d’Este for the bell tower of the Cathedral and for the arrangement of the equestrian monument to Niccolò III, but the presence of the great architect did not have a major impact in the city’s architecture. which remained dominated by the late-fourteenth century tradition with the use of decorated terracotta .
For defensive needs and for the growing housing demand, the Este’s interventions on the city focused mainly on urban planning rather than on the construction of individual buildings. Ferrara was essentially a medieval city, with a nucleus of narrow, winding streets, with no squares and closed to the south by Po di Volano and to the north by the Giovecca canal, with the only emergencies in the Duomo, the former Estense residence and, a little further to the north, the Castle of San Michele .
A first expansion took place with Borso d’Este in the middle of the century, but it was especially Ercole I who set up an ambitious urban project, in the context of the Renaissance experience of the ” ideal city “, which is today remembered as one of the first in Europe and has earned the city the recognition of UNESCO World Heritage Site of ‘ UNESCO. In fact, Ercole entrusted the architect Biagio Rossetti with planning a doubling of the city according to a new rational scheme, the so-called Herculean Addition .
First of all, the Giovecca ditch was buried, making a wide road, the Corso della Giovecca, which hinged with the ancient part of the city: in fact, at the outlets of the medieval streets it made regular extensions, organically merging the old and the new. The new part, referring to Roman town planning in the descriptions of Vitruvius, had an orthogonal road network that was divided into two main axes: via degli Angeli (today Corso Ercole I), which was a previous link between the castle and Belfiore., and via dei Prioni, which went from the Po gate to the Porta a Mare towards East-West. This axis in particular, completely new and with a full “public” flavor (compared to the other axis that remained linked to the passage of the dukes), was particularly emphasized with a large tree-lined square, the current Piazza Ariostea .
To integrate the addition with the rest of the city and soften the possible rigidity of the scheme, Rossetti left green areas that would act as a “pause” in the building fabric and, for the buildings he designed, he continued to use traditional terracotta. The monumental views were also avoided at the outlets of the streets, preferring glimpses of architecture. The paradigmatic prerogatives of his project are fully felt at the intersection of the axes, the so-called “Quadrivio degli Angeli”, which was not emphasized with a square, but only by the elegant decorations of the corners of the buildings, among which the Palazzo dei Diamanti stands out, by Rossetti. The building owes its name to the pointed spiked cladding, which creates an evocative chiaroscuro effect, with slabs decorated with candelabras at the corner on the crossroads, where a balcony is also set. The other buildings on the crossroads did not equalize the grandeur, concentrating rather on the search for variation effects, with large portals or corner pillars .
The new urban situation in Ferrara was, in the Italian and European landscape of the time, the most modern and also the most durable in time: there is no clear split between the city of the lords and cities of the subjects, nor is there a relationship of subjection between the two (as was the case in Mantua or in Pienza), but rather there is a harmonious integration between the parts, each with its own characterization. A complete development of the Addition would have been completed over time, even if the lack of population growth and the subsequent fall of the dynasty blocked the project. Despite this, thanks to the modernity and the organic nature of the original project, the new face of the city has held up well to urban transformations up to the present day.
Source from Wikipedia