Giovanni Busi, called Cariani, was a Bergamasque, but worked principally in Venice. He was perhaps a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and Palma Vecchio, but was also influenced by Giorgione, Titian and Lotto. In turn, some of his works foreshadow his fellow-Bergamasque, Caravaggio. Some frescoes have recently been discovered in the citadel, Bergamo. Other works are in the Royal Collection, Windsor, and in Bergamo and other museums.
This work is one of Cariani’s most wrenching and psychologically charged. It shows him at the height of his interest in Lombard art and even in Lombard industry, as Brescia and Milan were known for the manufacture of arms and armor. The painting likewise exhibits a Lombard intensity in the observation of naturalistic detail that lends particularity and authenticity to the scene. However, numerous elements of the painting were inspired by Northern prints (by Scongauer, Cranach and D�rer).
The complex and unusual iconography of the “Sewing Madonna” includes the maternal symbolism conveyed by the quail and the rose tree behind the Virgin. Cariani used the same symbols in his Saint Gottard altarpiece to allude to the divine motherhood of the Madonna and to her virginity. The iconography of the National Gallery picture also includes symbols of fertility such as the rabbit and the cedar tree behind St Elizabeth, references to human motherhood. The most peculiar characteristic of the painting is, however, the human, everyday atmosphere of the scene: this quality is what places the painting in direct rapport with the style of the contemporary Lombard school. Also evident is the influence of Palma il Vecchio in the background landscape, which is distinctly separate from the scene in the foreground.
Art historians have assigned the painting to Cariani’s second Venetian period, between 1524 and 1530.
This painting was first described as in the Albani family palace in Bergamo and as a group portrait of members of that family. Francesco Albani, a leading member of the nobility, was one of Cariani’s principal patrons. However, it is assumed by some critics that it is a genre-like scene featuring courtesans and their male admirers.
Born in the province of Bergamo, Cariani learnt painting in Venice, probably in the workshop of Sebastiano del Piombo. He was one of the most intriguing of the second-rate artists to emerge in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In the Venetian milieu dominated by Titian, he was capable of preserving his singular tone, his powerful, immediate realism, his particular style which incorporated elements from Sebastiano and Titian and sometimes from other artists such as Palma Vecchio and Lorenzo Lotto.
This painting, which was attributed to Lucas van Leyden in the seventeenth century, was meant for private devotion and meditation, as its size suggests it.
This altarpiece comes from the church of San Gottardo in Bergamo. The represented saints are Apollonia, Augustine, Catherine, Joseph, Grata, Filippo Benizzi, and Barbara. The painter was influenced by the naturalism of Giorgione and the colorism of the late period of Titian, as well as by Lorenzo Lotto.
