Amico Aspertini


Amico Aspertini, also called Amerigo Aspertini, was an Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor whose complex, eccentric, and eclectic style anticipates Mannerism. He is considered one of the leading exponents of the Bolognese School of painting.

Biography

He was born in Bologna to a family of painters, and studied under masters such as Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Francia. He traveled to Rome with his father in 1496, and is briefly documented there again between 1500–1503, returning to Bologna thereafter and painting in a style influenced by Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi. To his Roman years belong at least two collections of drawings, the "Parma Notebook" and the Wolfegg Codex. In Bologna in 1504, he joined Francia and Costa in painting frescoes for the Oratory of Santa Cecilia next to San Giacomo Maggiore, a work commissioned by Giovanni II Bentivoglio.
In 1508-1509, while in exile from Bologna following the fall of the Bentivoglio family, Aspertini painted the splendid frescoes in the Chapel of the Cross in the Basilica di San Frediano in Lucca. Aspertini was also one of two artists chosen to decorate a triumphal arch for the entry into Bologna of Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V in 1529. He produced sculptures for doors in San Petronio Basilica in Bologna. Aspertini also painted façade decorations, and altarpieces. Many of his works are often eccentric and charged in expression. For example, the Pietà he painted inside San Petronio appears to occur in an other-worldly electric sky.
His Tuscan near-contemporary Giorgio Vasari described Aspertini as having an eccentric, half-insane personality. According to Vasari, he was ambidextrous and worked so rapidly with both hands that he was able to divide chiaroscuro between them, painting chiaro with one hand and scuro with the other. Vasari also quotes Aspertini as complaining that all his Bolognese colleagues were copying Raphael.
He died in Bologna.

Anthology of works