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Bastiano Mainardi

Italian, 1460 - 1513

BiographyBorn San Gimignano, 23 Sept 1466; died Florence, Sept 1513.

Italian painter. Vasari mentioned that Mainardi was a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio and that he was still working in the studio at the time of his master’s death. Vasari also claimed that Mainardi collaborated with Ghirlandaio on several works between 1475 and 1477, including the fresco decoration of the chapel of S Fina in the Collegiata, the collegiate church in San Gimignano, and on the frescoes in the abbey of Passignano in Val di Pesa, near Florence. Given the dates of these works, it was thought that Mainardi was born between 1450 and 1460 and that he was, if not a contemporary of Ghirlandaio’s, certainly one of his earliest collaborators, together with Ghirlandaio’s brother Davide. The discovery that Mainardi was born in 1466 would suggest that the two painters’ relationship was that of master and pupil, at least until the early 1480s. Certainly Mainardi could not have collaborated on the frescoes in the Collegiata.

Mainardi was the son of a wealthy apothecary in San Gimignano and was probably taken into Domenico Ghirlandaio’s studio in the 1470s. From then on, he worked constantly with the Ghirlandaio family and continued to do so after Domenico’s death in 1494, when his younger brothers, Davide and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, took over management of the studio. In June 1494 Mainardi married the brothers’ half-sister, Alessandra. Although it is difficult to define Mainardi’s role in the Ghirlandaio studio, he presumably collaborated on the frescoes (1486–90) in the choir of S Maria Novella, Florence, since his portrait is included in the scene of Joachim Driven from the Temple. He was working for the studio in Pisa between the end of 1492 and the summer of 1494, and in 1493 he painted an Assumption of the Virgin (destr.) in the Palazzo dei Priori, Pisa.

Mainardi is first recorded working as an independent master on 20 July 1484, when he was paid for painting a screen (destr.) for the high altar in the Collegiata, San Gimignano. In 1487 he frescoed St Gimignano Blessing Three Noblemen in S Agostino, San Gimignano; the work (in situ) was commissioned by Fra Domenico Strambi, whose tomb beneath the fresco was completed the following year. For the same patron and in the same church, Mainardi frescoed St Peter Martyr (1488; destr. 17th century). Two frescoes representing St Jerome and the Virgin and Child in the chapel in the Bargello, Florence, date from 1490. The surviving early works are heavily influenced by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Vasari attributed the large fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin with St Thomas in the Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence, to Mainardi, adding that the cartoon was provided by Ghirlandaio. From these works, it is difficult to define Mainardi’s individual style, and numerous disparate products of Ghirlandaio’s studio have been attributed to him. These include portraits (see Davies) and such drawings as the Study of the Heads of Two Children (Florence, Uffizi), which is connected to a series of tondi (e.g. Paris, Louvre) often attributed to Mainardi, but which should be regarded rather as products of Ghirlandaio’s large bottega.

Mainardi’s oeuvre has to be reconstructed around a single fresco cycle in the chapel of S Bartolo in S Agostino, San Gimignano. Originally the frescoes were signed and dated 1500 (Pecori). The Doctors of the Church are depicted in the quadripartite vault, and on the left wall SS Gimignano, Lucy and Nicholas are shown standing in a fictive loggia with pilasters and a frieze richly decorated with zoomorphic motifs and a landscape in the distance. A number of paintings in San Gimignano can be grouped around these frescoes and would seem to date from the turn of the 16th century. They include a large altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Six Saints, which stylistically belongs to the late 15th century and would seem to have been painted with an assistant’s help, two tondi of the Virgin and Child and a panel of the Virgin and Child with SS Jerome and Bernard dated 1502 (all San Gimignano, Mus. Civ.), all of which came from local monasteries. Other works of this date in San Gimignano include a tabernacle of the Virgin and Child with Cherubim in Via S Giovanni, and a series of lunettes of the Virgin and Child and busts of saints in the vestibule of the Ospedale di S Fina. Although he was still under the influence of Ghirlandaio, he seems also to have been influenced by such Florentine masters of the younger generation as Francesco Granacci, who was his fellow pupil in Ghirlandaio’s studio. A fresco of a Sacra Conversazione in S Lorenzo in Cappiano, near Incisa, echoes some of Raffaellino del Garbo’s stylistic traits. A Pietà with SS John the Baptist and Paul (Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), usually attributed to Antonio da Viterbo (d 1516), is stylistically very close to the frescoes in the chapel of S Bartolo, San Gimignano, and can be attributed to Mainardi. The panel was commissioned by Guglielmo Altoviti in 1500 for the chapel in the Palazzo Vicariato in Certaldo.

The compositions of Mainardi’s later works are repetitive, although in an attempt to bring his style up to date he simplified and softened the forms, perhaps influenced by Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto Albertinelli, but above all under the influence of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, in whose studio he almost certainly worked in the first years of the 16th century. Examples of this phase are the Virgin and Child with SS Francis and Julian (Palermo, Chiaramonte–Bordonaro priv. col., see van Marle, p. 221, fig.), painted in 1506 for Pietro Nori, a notary in San Gimignano employed by the Mainardi family, and the Virgin and Child with St Justus and a Female Saint . A banner of the Holy Face (San Gimignano, Mus. A. Sacra and church of the Compagnia della Misericordia) may also date from this period. Mainardi also undertook decorative work: he painted a plaster statue of the Virgin (untraced) for the rector of the Ospedale di S Fina, and in 1500 he gilded the marble tomb of St Bartolo, sculpted by Benedetto da Maiano, in the church of S Agostino, San Gimignano. In 1501 he frescoed a vault in the Collegiata in San Gimignano with blue sky and stars, and in 1504 and 1507 he decorated banners for the feast of S Fina.

Lisa Venturini. "Mainardi, Bastiano." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T053244 (accessed April 11, 2012).

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