Painter, active in France. Grouped under this name are a small number of paintings and drawings executed by an artist probably of Italian origin who is known to have worked in France between 1555 and 1570. A painting representing Flora (private collection) has given its name to this remarkable heir to the first Fontainebleau school. Together with this painting, three other works permit a firm appreciation of the personality and style of the Master: the Triumph of Flora (private collection, Vicenza), which is considered to be a workshop production; the Birth of Cupid (New York, Metropolitan Museum); and the AllegoryGLOSSARYA work of art which represents some abstract quality or idea, either by means of a single figure (personification) or by grouping objects and figures together. Renaissance allegories make frequent allusions both to both Greek and Roman legends and literature, and also to the wealth of Christian allegorical stories and symbols developed during the Middle Ages. of Abundance (Ravenna, Accademia). All these works show strong affinities with the style of Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio and also with that of Nicolo dell'Abate, who arrived in Fontainebleau in 1552.
In these paintings the principal figure, passive and occupying a large part of the picture space, is contrasted with other more dynamic figures: putti in the TriumphGLOSSARYWith growing interest from the early 14th century in the history of ancient Rome came a fascination with the city's conquests, the wars by which they were won - and the ceremony which marked their success: the victor's triumph. The knowledge that the privilege of being commemorated by one of these enormous and costly processions of warriors, loot and prisoners was given sparingly, only to the sole commander of a major victory over a foreign army of whom at least 5000 were slain, added to the glamour of the triumph. Its centrepiece was the chariot of the victor himself. Dante gave one to Beatrice in Purgatorio XXIX: 'Rome upon Africanus ne'er conferred / Nor on Augustus's self, a car so brave'. But it was tentatively with the relief carvings on the Triumphal Arch (1452-66) at Castelnuovo in Naples commemorating Alfonso the Magnanimous, and finally with Mantegna's superb Triumph of Caesar cartoons (Hampton Court), that the visual reconstruction of a Roman triumph became complete. Meanwhile, in an age which did not like the idea of large numbers of victory-flushed soldiers parading through its streets, the military triumph became sublimated, as it were, into a number of less controversial forms. This was largely under the influence of Petrarch's 'Trionfi' - poems describing the processions commemorating the triumphs of love, chastity, death; fame, time and eternity. Disseminated soon after his death, they soon appeared in illuminated manuscripts, and the triumph scene became a popular one for woodcuts, decorated marriage chests and other paintings, most beautifully of all on the backs of Piero della Francesca's portraits of Federigo da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza. Other 'triumphs' were invented: of the seasons, of virtues and of the arts. Nor was the theme allowed to be simply a profane one. Just before his death Savonarola published his 'Triumph of the Cross', in which the reader was invited to imagine 'a four-wheeled chariot on which is seated Christ as Conqueror.' Before it go the apostles, patriarchs and prophets, beside it the army of martyrs, behind it, after 'a countless number of virgins, of both sexes', come the prisoners: 'the serried ranks of the enemies of the Church of Christ.' This aspect of the theme was magnificently realized in Titian's great woodcut 'The Triumph of the Faith'., servants in the Birth and children in the Abundance. As in the work of Nicolo dell'Abate, but in a more anecdotal way, nature is very much present, particularly in the flowers strewn around in such profusion that they could almost be seen as the signature of the artist.
