Pseudo-Boltraffio

Art history uses the name Pseudo-Boltraffio to designate an unknown painter of the Lombard school who worked between 1500 and 1530.

Identification and work

In 1920 Wilhelm Suida coined the emergency name pseudo-Boltraffio in the monthly booklet for art history for a painter from the Leonardo School who is still unknown to this day and whose works have long been considered the works of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio or are still valid today. This is an artist who knew how to collect and unite the elements of different artists without completely reaching their originality. It was his specialty to experiment with bright yet tasteful colors and to make his pictures so beautiful that there was no room for visible, natural blemishes.

He liked to paint affectionate, youthful imaginative heads in the Leonardesque style, which were in great demand at the time. In addition, he also created a number of Madonna and a few altarpieces. None of the works can be dated firmly, so that one has to fall back on comparative data, the models on which he was based. These were mainly Leonardo himself, but also Andrea Solario , Marco d'Oggiono and above all Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio , with whose pictures his works were often confused in the past. Even today some ascriptions fluctuate between Boltraffio and the pseudo-Boltraffio.

The oeuvre ascribed to the pseudo-Boltraffio is quite extensive.

Some selected works that have been published as works of the pseudo-Boltraffio

• Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
  • Maria with the child.
• Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi
  • Narcissus.
• London, National Gallery
  • Narcissus.
  • Maria with the child.
• Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera
  • Mary with the child, Saints Paul and John and an angel.
• El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas
  • Mary and child

Bibliography

• Wilhelm Suida: Leonardo and his circle. Verlag F. Bruckmann A.-G., Munich 1929