Born ca. 1486-1490 in Paredes, Spain and first trained by his father Pietro Berruguete in a conservatively capable Italicized Flemish style; in Italy by 1506, Berruguete joined an emergent circle of young artists developing a nascent Mannerism within the stylistic sway of Raphael, Michelangelo and Andrea del Sarto[1]. The tondo structure reflects the underlying lessons of Michelangelo’s Doni Madonna tondo, painted about coeval with Berruguete’s arrival in Florence, while the plain local colors and precisely outlined figures might reflect his father’s earlier lessons. On the other hand, there are direct quotations or slight variations from later del Sarto painting:
the head of Joseph particularly in cast and pose match the same figure in del Sarto’s Holy Family with the Infant St. John in a copy in the Uffizi, for which a preparatory study – or copy for atelier replication – is in the Ashmolean (cf. Luciani Berti et al, Andrea del Sarto 1486-1530: Dipinti e disegni a Firenze, Florence, 1986-7, no. XXXIII, pp. 175-177).
Then too, the half-tone, half shaded female faces under deep cowls, are borrowed almost whole cloth from del Sarti. For the rest of these paintings assigned to the last years of Berruguete’s Italian sojourn, including some briefly and inconclusively attributed with doubts to Gian Francesco Bembo with whom Berruguete shared a study in his first years in Italy but whose own work is distinct from his. There are closer bonds derived from a common adulation of del Sarto between Berruguete and the young Mannerists of his generation with whom he shared many traits of facial types, shading and even the miniaturization of background narrative addendum, like the stoning of St. Stephan barely noted in the present tondo. For the rest, Berreguete’s work has of late been correctly integrated into the larger context of his compatriots in Florence during his working years there for which cf. entries on Berruguete and the others in Antonio Natali et al, L’officina della maniera Varietà e fierezza nell’arte fiorentino del Cinquecento fra le due republiche 1494-1530, Venice, 1996; Antonio Natali et al, Norma e capriccio: Spagnoli in Italia agli esordi della “maniera moderna” Milan, 2013; C.D.Dickerson III and Mark McDonald, Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain, New Haven and London, 2019; invaluable throughout with a chapter on Berruguete’s Florentine work (pp. 2-32) and of great value Berruguete’s sculpture in Toledo where in a remarkably cyclical fusion El Greco now influenced the legacy of Michaelangelo.
[1] S.(ydney), J.(ames), Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1961, s.v. “Berruguete” inter alia; S.(ydney), J.(ames), Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500 – 1600, New Haven & London, (1971) 3rd ed. 1993), p. 106 for a basic summary of Berruguete and his circle in the Mannerist adaptations of High Renaissance Classicism. For a more recent and comprehensive review of Berruguete and his Italian and Spanish contemporaries in emergent Mannerism cf.
Antonio Natali, L’officinia della maniera, Spagnoli in Italia agli esordi della ”maniera moderna,” Bologna, 2013. Within the wealth of illustrations and considered entries in this catalogue, the issue of Berruguete’s early association with Gian Francesco Bembo is raised as a possible alternative attribution for at least one painting that is part of the comparative evidence for the modern corpus of paintings accepted as by Berruguete In an entry dealing with an ultimately relegated possible attribution of the Loesser Madonna tondo in the Palazzo Vecchio to either Gian Francesco Bembo or Rosso Fiorentino, all evidence of the porous mingling of styles within Berruguete’s circle; cf.
Lizzie Boubli, Natali et al, cat. 121, p. 334, ‘Alonso Berruguete?’. In all, the dismissed attribution of the Loesser tondo and any of its kindred works – as Uffizi Pietá – to any but Berruguete can be credited less to meticulous connoisseurship than to the confoundingly close early ties within a close knit association of inventive and enthusiastically eclectic young artists.
[2] For his Italian paintings and later sculptural genius cf. C. D. Dickerson III and Mark MacDonald et al, Alonsio Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain, Exhibition Catalogue Washinton & Dallas, 2019-2020, New Haven & London, pp. 18-34.
