Niccolò dell'Abbate

• 1. A Painter From Modena

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  Niccolò dell'Abbate was a painter born in Modena, the son of a violinist, who died in 1571 at the royal château of Fontainebleau in France. His birth year is uncertain, either 1509 or 1512. He worked in fresco and in oils, in the Mannerist style, and belonged to the Emilian school of northern Italy. Even his name is a small puzzle. Catalogues list him under either Niccolò or Abbate, though the first form is the more correct. He also appears as Nicolò. Two questions run through his career. How did a painter from Modena end up on the team that carried the Italian Renaissance into France? And why has so little of his painted work survived to the present day?

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• 2. Training In Modena

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  Alberto Fontana was the fellow student who worked beside Niccolò in the Modena studio of Antonio Begarelli. Begarelli was a local sculptor, so the young painter learned his craft in a sculptor's workshop rather than a painter's. Painters from nearby Ferrara shaped his early taste, especially Garofalo and Dosso Dossi. Niccolò soon specialized in long friezes, painted bands that ran around the walls of a room, with secular and mythological subjects. One such frieze decorated the Palazzo dei Beccherie in 1537. Among his early pieces was the Martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul, painted for the church of the abbey of San Pietro in Modena. It helped to establish his name. The great houses of the Emilian countryside were about to offer him far larger walls.

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• 3. Castles Of Emilia

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  In the late 1530s, the counts Boiardo, owners of the Rocca di Scandiano, sat for Niccolò as portrait subjects. They also gave him rooms to decorate. There he painted 12 frescoes, one for each book of Virgil's Aeneid. His most daring work at Scandiano was a courtly ceiling called Concert, from the early 1540s. It shows a ring of young musicians seen from below in steep perspective, a technique known as sotto in su. Around 1540-43 he painted the Hercules Room in the Rocca Meli Lupi at Soragna. Scholars also think he may have made the loggia frescoes later removed from the Palazzo Casotti at Reggio Emilia. In 1547 he left this world of fortified country palaces for the larger city of Bologna.

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• 4. Bologna And Its Poets

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  Two painters, Correggio and Parmigianino, changed Niccolò's style after he moved to Bologna in 1547. He remained there until 1552. His Bolognese pictures favored elaborate landscapes and aristocratic scenes of hunting and courtly love. These often ran in parallel with mythological stories. He decorated the Palazzo Poggi in the city. Near Modena, at the ducal palace in Sassuolo, he painted a cycle of frescoes based on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. In Bologna he also made illustrations for the same poem. A sonnet written in the city praised him by comparing him to Raphael and Titian, among other masters. One work survives that shows his maturing style, a landscape in stucco in the Palazzo dell'Università. In 1552 an invitation, or an ambition, drew him across the Alps.

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• 5. The Fontainebleau Workshop

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  At the royal Château de Fontainebleau, Niccolò joined a decorating team directed by Francesco Primaticcio. This group of artists is now called the School of Fontainebleau. Within two years of his arrival he was drawing a design for a decoration honoring Anne de Montmorency. The preparatory drawing is kept at the Louvre. In Paris he frescoed the chapel ceiling of the Hôtel de Guise, following designs by Primaticcio. That building is destroyed. He also took private commissions for portable canvases, with mythological subjects set in landscapes. Another project was a series of tapestry designs called Les Mois Arabesques. Some of those designs were later adopted by the painted enamel industry of Limoges.

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• 6. Festivals Of The Court

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  Artists of Niccolò's day had a function that is often overlooked. They designed ephemeral decorations, temporary structures built to celebrate a special occasion in court circles and taken down afterward. Niccolò took part in this work. His best-known example is the decoration for the triumphal entry into Paris staged for Charles IX and his bride, Elisabeth of Austria. Almost nothing of such festive work lasts, which is part of why his reputation rests on other pieces. His last painted works came in 1571, when he made 16 murals with help from his son, Giulio Camillo. Those murals belong to the same story of lost or fragile decoration.

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• 7. Landscapes And Legacy

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  The Rape of Proserpine hangs in the Louvre, and Orpheus and Landscape with the Death of Eurydice hangs in the National Gallery in London. These two paintings show what Niccolò is best known for. His mythological landscapes brought the Flemish world landscape, a wide panoramic view of land, into French art. The Louvre also holds a collection of his drawings, which were profuse and elegant. Little else survives of his frescoes. In 1643 the Austrian regent, Anne, ordered many of his canvases burnt. His landscapes made for Charles IX still influenced two 17th century painters, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Back in Modena, his great-nephew Ercole Abbate became one of his pupils.

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