Intorno alla Madonna Cagnola: problematiche aperte e qualche pista di ricerca

This dual-authored article proposes to re-examine the 15th century painting of the Madonna and Child with angels preserved in the Collection of the Villa Cagnola at Gazzada. The critical issue that has developed, starting in the fifties of the 20th century, divides the studies into two totally distinct schools of thought as regards the stylistic interpretation of the work: on the one hand there is an inclination towards a Ligurian-Provencal origin of the anonymous “Master of the Cagnola Madonna”; on the other an attempt is made to identify the latter with the Milanese Court painter Zanetto Bugatto, a painter that we can connect to a substantial corpus of documents, but no body of paintings. The essay is divided into two separate sections: the first examines the problems of the identification of Zanetto Bugatto as the “Master of the Cagnola Madonna”; the second contextualizes the Madonna Cagnola and the collection of paintings gathered around it in a broad cultural context. These paintings in fact reveal stronger affinities with various figurative expressions of the Mediterranean area. In the second half of the 15th century, in Spain, in the South of France, in Southern Italy and in Liguria, there developed a language sharing common elements, based on the reworking of Flemish models, with a predilection for chromatic splendour, the formal synthesis united with decorative elegance, which relates the research of artists painting between Valencia, Barcellona, Naples and Sicily, Nice and Provence. And it is in the Ligurian-Provencal area, with artists such as Donato de’ Bardi, Giusto d’Alemagna, Enguerrand Quarton, Ludovico Brea and Nicolò Corso, that we must seek the antecedents and heirs to the refined language developed by the “Master of the Cagnola Madonna”.