Abstract

Michelangelo di Pietro Membrini (1460–1525) was a painter of the late Quattrocento, who collaborated with Bernardino Pinturicchio in Rome in the 1480s, and worked in Lucca at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries, when he became one of the most prominent figures of the local school of painting. During this period, the Lucchese painting was strongly infl uenced by the Florentine art of the 1470s–1480s: the compositional schemes of Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi, the balanced and elegant style of Ghirlandaio, the lyrical manner of the young Filippino Lippi. Lucca appears to demonstrate an amazing mixture of styles of various Florentine artists who left their works to the city. In terms of style, Michelangelo di Pietro is no exception, albeit he is distinguished by a specific interest in the decorative language in the antique taste and which was mastered by him in Rome, while he worked in the workshop of Bernardino Pinturicchio. The antique motifs extensively used by Michelangelo di Pietro in his mature religious paintings amount to a rather “standard” set of elements characteristic of eclectic masters and have a predominantly decorative rather than semantic function: these are architectural elements ornamented in a classical manner, music stands, candelabra and images of fantastic creatures. However, the iconography and phantasmagoric interpretation of these motifs, as well as the variety of their sources indicate that he was a fully-fledged artist in the adaptation of the classical heritage, which he could study in the originals during his sojourn in Rome. Despite the great similarity in the interpretation of the form, it is by no means determined by the influence of the artists who worked in Lucca, the acknowledged masters of all’antica decoration Amico Aspertini and Filippino Lippi. They are more similar to Michelangelo di Pietro in their interest in the Dutch artistic tradition. Neither can it be reduced to the infl uence of the leader of the Lucchese school of painting, Matteo Civitali, who was an ardent classicalist. It rather betrays a fondness for some of the artistic solutions which Michelangelo di Pietro borrowed in his Roman years from the monumental painting of Pinturicchio.