Francesco Zucco (Bergamo, circa 1570 – Bergamo, 3 May 1627), Crucifixion with Saints

Francesco Zucco (Bergamo, circa 1570 – Bergamo, 3 May 1627)

Crucifixion with Saints

Oil on canvas, 76 x 60 cm

With frame 95 x 79 cm

Critical note Professor Giuseppe Sava

The crucifixion described here belongs to the Lombard school of the seventeenth century. Against a background characterized by cold tones and a dark and stormy landscape, the buildings of a city that should be identified with Jerusalem can be glimpsed. On the right, a bare and earthy mountainous backdrop covers the rest of the urban view, thus drawing the gaze to the foreground where at the foot of the cross the Magdalene and a warrior saint, in armor and seventeenth-century clothes, are kneeling. If the first looks at Jesus, weeping and pining, the second shows the ultimate sacrifice with his hand and turns his gaze to the spectator. The latter, holding the palm of martyrdom and wearing a large crimson cloak, typical of warrior saints, reveals his identity thanks to the iron mace placed on the rock, to his right. The iconographic detail allows us to recognize Saint Defendente, a Roman soldier who lived in Thebes in the third century and was martyred under the emperor Maximian. The name to be pronounced for the small Crucifixion is that of Francesco Zucco, a painter to whom Count Francesco Maria Tassi (1793) dedicated an entire biography. Born in Bergamo around 1570 (the exact year is not yet supported by documents), he was soon inclined

“to study painting”, was “sent by the Father to Cremona in the celebrated school of the Campi”. The paternity of the work can be deduced starting from the habit of immortalizing the figures kneeling on a block of stone, as in this case and as in the altarpiece in San Pancrazio in Carobbio degli Angeli, dated 1608, in which the Virgin and Child are venerated by Saint Bernard and Saint Catherine of Siena. The rapid touches of light also strike some points of the landscape behind and allow us to better distinguish the profile of the buildings. The tangents with Giovan Battista Moroni and with the Bergamo school are clearly evident, although the naturalistic reading gives way to an almost heraldic style of painting, so that the figures, rather dapper and lifeless, reach an almost unreal consistency: it is the result of the intertwining of the culture of the post-Tridentine image, purified and rigorist, with the instances of the last season of Mannerism, that of Cremonese origin. In this sense, we can cite Zucco's first masters: the Campi brothers, especially Giulio, in whose Crucifixion in Santa Maria della Passione we find the Magdalene embracing the cross and strong chiaroscuro contrasts. Francesco Zucco himself created a larger version for the church of San Lorenzo in Bergamo. The same approach can be found in the canvas of the same subject by Giovan Paolo Cavagna, preserved at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia. For the periodization, we must place the work between the second and third decade of the seventeenth century, at the moment of full maturity for the artist from Bergamo.