Giovanni Andrea Donducci, detto il Mastelletta
Giovanni Andrea Donducci, called il Mastelletta, was born in Bologna in 1575 and died there in 1655. His career belongs to one of the most crowded and difficult moments in Bolognese painting: the period after the Carracci reform, when the city’s painters were working under the shadow of Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, while also responding to older Emilian traditions, Venetian colour, Roman collecting, and the new market for pictures made for private rooms. Mastelletta was never an obscure painter, but he has often been difficult to place. He was remembered by Carlo Cesare Malvasia in the Felsina pittrice of 1678, admired by collectors, and later recovered by modern critics as one of the most original outsiders of post-Carracci Bologna. Yet much of his reputation has been shaped by the problem of “bizzarria”: the sense that both his art and his life were eccentric, irregular, and hard to reconcile with the dominant classicising line of Bolognese painting. Daniele Benati’s starting point is that Malvasia remains indispensable, but must be read critically, since Malvasia tends to interpret the character of the paintings as a direct reflection of the character of the man.
This is the first caution needed in approaching Mastelletta. Malvasia’s account gives a vivid image of the painter, but it also constructs him as a type. In the Felsina, Mastelletta becomes the post-Carracci equivalent of Amico Aspertini: the irregular Bolognese artist, gifted but strange, set against the more authoritative current of local classicism. Later writers often inherited that image. In the nineteenth century Bolognini Amorini repeated aspects of it, while in the early twentieth century Matteo Marangoni turned Mastelletta into a more attractive modern figure, a painter praised for rebellion against academic rule and for the freedom of his pictorial invention. The correction introduced by later criticism has not been to deny the eccentricity of the works, but to detach that eccentricity from simple anecdote. Mastelletta’s unusual art was not just the product of temperament. It was formed within a very particular historical and artistic field.
That field was Bologna around 1600. Mastelletta’s relation to the Carracci is one of the central problems of his biography. Malvasia’s preparatory material, drawing on testimony from Alessandro Tiarini, had even suggested that Mastelletta “never knew the Carracci”, though the printed Felsina is more cautious. Modern discussion has tended to shift the emphasis away from a simple question of direct pupilship. For Benati, the crucial point is Mastelletta’s closeness, around the middle of the first decade of the seventeenth century, to Ludovico Carracci. Without knowledge of Ludovico’s works of that period, including paintings such as the Cristo nutrito dagli angeli, Mastelletta’s mature activity becomes difficult to understand. At the same time, his birth date complicates any straightforward narrative of formation. If Donducci was born in 1575, he was already about thirty by the time he came close to Ludovico in the first decade of the century. This means that an earlier phase has to be allowed for: one in which he was still tied to Mannerist tradition and especially to Parmigianino, rather than already absorbed into the Carracci reform.
The early works proposed by Benati for this pre-Ludovico phase include a private Ritrovamento di Mosè, the Sacra famiglia at Dijon, and a Fuga in Egitto connected with the Quistelli altarpiece, formerly in San Francesco and now in the Museo Comunale at Mirandola, which was in progress in 1603. This is important because it gives Mastelletta a longer and more complex development than the old image of the eccentric late-Carracci painter would suggest. His early formation looks back to Parmigianino and to a refined, artificial, consciously retrospective figure style. The Carracci world, and Ludovico in particular, then become part of his development, but they do not entirely define it.
The other decisive biographical question is his stay in Rome. Malvasia’s account mentions Annibale Carracci’s appreciation of Mastelletta, though Benati is sceptical of this detail, since Annibale died in 1609. Malvasia also refers to Mastelletta’s contact with Agostino Tassi, who arrived in Rome in 1611. On this basis Benati places Mastelletta’s Roman stay between the first and second decades of the seventeenth century, rather than around 1600, as Coliva had at one point suggested. The chronology is not a small matter, because the Roman experience helps explain the early presence of Mastelletta’s works in major collections, including those of the Spada, Barberini, Giustiniani and Santacroce families. It also helps explain why his art developed apart from that of other Bolognese painters in Rome. Domenichino, Albani and Viola were all working through variants of Annibale Carracci’s classical landscape. Mastelletta, by contrast, pursued a more artificial, playful and cultivated kind of painting, in which landscape could dominate the scene and the figures could be reduced to small, elegant presences.
This Roman success links Mastelletta to a broader change in the market for painting. Benati places him among the artists who helped define pittura da stanza in Bologna: pictures made for rooms, domestic interiors and private collecting rather than for altars or large public cycles. This type of painting was not confined to aristocratic houses. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it increasingly entered the homes of the upper and middle bourgeoisie, including families connected with trade and enterprise. Vincenzo Giustiniani had already observed, around 1610, that in Rome, Venice, elsewhere in Italy, and beyond Italy too, it had become fashionable to furnish palaces with paintings rather than with the costly hangings formerly used. Mastelletta’s art belonged to this new world of portable, collectible, visually engaging pictures. His subjects include biblical histories, landscapes, outdoor banquets, riders passing through woods, literary themes and scenes that approach everyday genre. They offered pleasure, display, invention and cultivated amusement, not only devotional instruction.
This helps explain both his success and the unevenness of his later reputation. Mastelletta was capable of large public religious painting, but Benati sees him above all as a painter da stanza. The great exception is the pair of enormous canvases for the Cappella dell’Arca in San Domenico, Bologna: the Miracolo dei quaranta annegati and the Risanamento di Napoleone Orsini. The two canvases belong to the documented San Domenico campaign of 1613–15; the Miracolo itself is dated 1613. They also became the subject of an important modern clarification. Malvasia’s reference to a later rifacimento by Mastelletta had encouraged the idea that the canvases, as they now appear, might belong substantially to a later phase, even to the 1630s. Coliva and Benati reject this. The restoration by Maricetta Parlatore showed that the later intervention was not a radical reconception, but an extensive reprise or retouching of the original paint surface, which had suffered from cohesion and darkening problems within only a few years. The conception of the paintings therefore belongs to the documented years 1613–15.
The San Domenico commission may have been encouraged by Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, who had admired Mastelletta in Rome and was papal legate in Bologna from 1606 to 1611. It nevertheless placed the painter in a demanding public context. Benati is severe about the result, arguing that Mastelletta seems visibly uncomfortable with such vast church surfaces. Whether one accepts that judgement fully or not, the commission marks an essential point in his career: it shows the painter of private, capricious, landscape-rich invention attempting a monumental sacred scale, with dramatic results that remained central to his historiography.
After this phase, Mastelletta continued to develop the landscape component of his art. Toward the end of the second decade, Benati places a group of large landscape canvases, including works from the Ospedali di Faenza and the Paesaggio con Cristo e la Samaritana. These works are marked by strange, sharp, mountainous backgrounds and by a more expansive treatment of space. Malvasia associated some of these formations with the cliffs and ravines of Sasso, near Bologna, where Mastelletta was said to have withdrawn into solitude. As often with Malvasia, the anecdote is suggestive, but should not be made to carry too much weight. More securely, this period shows Mastelletta extending the landscape mode that had already brought him success in Rome and Bologna.
In the 1630s, according to Benati, Mastelletta underwent a significant change. Malvasia called this his second manner, “aperta e chiara”, and connected it with a lighter, clearer mode shaped by the growing authority of Guido Reni. Malvasia judged this later phase harshly, especially in the sacred works, but Benati is more balanced. He notes that even in this period there are paintings da stanza of considerable fascination, including the two versions of Mosè con le tavole della Legge, the Predica del Battista, and the large Ritorno del figliol prodigo, once in the Bonfiglioli collection in Strada Maggiore. The colour becomes lighter and more delicate, the figures more monumental, and the narrative accent more serious. Yet Mastelletta does not become simply solemn. Benati notes that even in serious subjects he allows room for secondary incidents and amused digressions, a feature that looks ahead, in some respects, to Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
Malvasia’s account of Mastelletta’s final years returns to the theme of withdrawal. He describes the painter living in Via delle Moline, apart from ordinary society, producing small copper paintings and little canvases, carrying them under his arm to barbers’ shops and other places, and selling them cheaply. Benati again treats this as a mixture of fact and literary shaping. It continues Malvasia’s larger habit of making the painter’s life and art mirror one another. Yet even here the anecdote has historical value. It suggests that Mastelletta had moved into a different kind of artistic economy, no longer working only for named patrons or fixed commissions, but producing pictures according to his own taste and offering them to occasional buyers. In that sense, the eccentric old painter of Malvasia’s biography also belongs to the history of a changing art market.
A biographical account of Mastelletta therefore has to hold two things together. On one hand, he was a Bolognese painter of the Carracci age, shaped by Ludovico, by the survival of Mannerist figure style, by Rome, by private collecting, and by the new demand for pictures made for rooms. On the other, he remained difficult to assimilate to the main narratives of Bolognese classicism. His career moves between public altarpieces and private landscapes, between sacred narrative and cultivated diversion, between large church commissions and small market pictures. The old language of “bizzarria” should not be discarded entirely, since it records something genuinely distinctive in his art. But it needs to be converted from anecdote into history: Mastelletta’s strangeness was not merely a personal oddity, but a pictorial position formed within the artistic, social and commercial conditions of early seventeenth-century Bologna.
Stylistic overview
Mastelletta’s style is best understood not as a simple rebellion against the Carracci, but as an eccentric route through the same Bolognese inheritance. Bologna around 1600 was not a city in which the sixteenth century had simply been discarded. The Carracci reform itself had grown out of a renewed engagement with earlier painting: Correggio, Parmigianino, Titian, Veronese, Raphael, the Ferrarese tradition, and the local Bolognese past. Coliva’s account is useful because it places Mastelletta within that broad field rather than outside it. His art is certainly separate, sometimes wilfully so, but it is not provincial, uninformed or merely capricious. It is the work of a painter who knew the available traditions and chose the more unstable possibilities within them.
That distinction is important. If the Carracci gave Bologna a new language of reform, Mastelletta turned repeatedly to those elements that resisted reforming equilibrium. He was drawn to what was nervous, luminous, anti-classical, theatrical or archaic in the pictorial past. His work does not reject the Carracci world from outside. It moves at an angle to it. Ludovico Carracci remains especially important, not least for Mastelletta’s simplified bodies, inflated forms and strange sacred drama. But Mastelletta’s paintings rarely settle into Ludovico’s gravity or Annibale’s classical balance. They keep returning to older and more oblique sources: Parmigianino, Nicolò dell’Abate, Tintoretto, Bassano, and, through the Roman landscape world, northern painters such as Paul Bril.
Parmigianino gives one of the keys to Mastelletta’s figure style. This is not a straightforward revival of elegant Parmese grace. Coliva argues that Mastelletta responds instead to the anti-classical centre of Parmigianino: the elongated body, the unstable contour, the spiritual unease hidden inside refinement. In Mastelletta, line is rarely a secure boundary. It trembles, thins, disperses, or is interrupted by light. Hands become especially expressive: long, nervous, sometimes almost boneless, sometimes no more than luminous signs at the ends of bodies. The figure may retain a memory of Mannerist elegance, but it has lost the calm confidence of decorative artifice. It is often stretched towards apparition.
This explains why Mastelletta’s figures can appear both graceful and awkward. Their strangeness is not merely a failure of anatomy. It belongs to the way the figure is conceived. Bodies are not built first and then coloured; they are often evoked through strokes, highlights, tonal fragments and flashes of pigment. Coliva’s reading of Mastelletta’s response to Parmigianino’s Visione di San Girolamo is suggestive here. Mastelletta is drawn not to the most obviously beautiful figures, but to the sleeping Saint Jerome, a body already open to visionary transformation. In his own Sogno di San Giuseppe, the borrowed figure loses density and becomes more diaphanous, as if physical form were being thinned out by the visionary state itself.
Venetian painting offered Mastelletta another way to unsettle form. The Carracci had already made Venetian colour central to their reform, but their Venetian canon tended towards Titian and Veronese, brought into relation with Raphael and with a renewed discipline of drawing. Mastelletta chose a more difficult line. Coliva stresses his attraction to late Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano, precisely the Venetian painters whose colour, light and movement were harder to reconcile with academic order. Calvesi’s hypothesis of a Venetian journey around 1612 or early 1613 remains attractive because Mastelletta’s handling of Tintoretto and Bassano often seems too direct to have been acquired only at second hand.
Tintoretto is crucial above all for light. Mastelletta does not simply borrow Tintoretto’s dramatic diagonals or crowded theatrical settings. He responds to the way light can alter form, disturb space and turn figures into events of illumination. In the Miracolo dei quaranta annegati, this becomes one of the central forces of the painting. The heavenly apparition, displaced to one side, activates the scene through rays and luminous shocks. But the result is not a clear progression through space. Light produces vibration, agitation and spatial arbitrariness. It breaks the surface into flashes and accents. It makes the scene less stable, not more legible.
This is one of the points at which Mastelletta’s art becomes most distinctive. In many seventeenth-century religious paintings, light helps organise meaning. In Mastelletta, it often does the opposite as well: it reveals, but it also unsettles. It runs across bodies and foliage, breaks up contour, confuses air and substance, and makes the surface restless. Coliva describes his execution as a kind of painting of touch, mobile and responsive to light, sometimes almost identified with light itself. That observation is particularly useful because it shifts attention away from drawing as the foundation of his art. Mastelletta’s figures and landscapes often seem to be brought into being by the brush as it touches, flickers, drags or sparks across the canvas.
Bassano supplied a different set of resources. From the Bassano family, Mastelletta could take crowded narrative fields, animals, tables, buckets, foreground objects, bent figures and a dense inventory of daily things. These elements do not always make his paintings more naturalistic. On the contrary, they often increase their oddity. A bucket, a laid table, a donkey or a figure bending with an amphora can become almost theatrical in its insistence. Bassano’s sacred narratives place biblical events within the visual density of rural life. Mastelletta absorbs that example, but alters its tone. The descriptive detail becomes capricious, sometimes comic, sometimes dreamlike. It gives his histories the character of a staged world full of small incidents, rather than a single action clarified for devotional reading.
Bassano also helps explain Mastelletta’s use of dark grounds and sudden chromatic emergence. Coliva distinguishes in his work a maniera scura, in which forms seem to arise out of blackness through flashes of colour and light. This black is not merely an expedient for hiding weak drawing, as Malvasia had suggested. It has compositional force. It divides space, absorbs bodies, and allows selected details to appear with heightened intensity. Figures are not always firmly described. They are reconstructed through luminous fragments: a sleeve, a hand, a face, a patch of cloth, a glancing highlight. This gives some of Mastelletta’s pictures their smoky, darting, half-apparitional quality.
The opposite procedure is the maniera chiara, in which forms are weakened not by darkness but by whiteness and pale diffusion. In the light-manner pictures connected with the Storie di Mosè, colours do not flare against black; they fade into pinks, greys, pale blues and greenish tones.
The figure may remain drawn, but its plastic substance is reduced. Forms become elementary, frayed or almost spectral. Coliva’s point is that the maniera scura and maniera chiara are not unrelated phases or accidents. They are two ways of treating colour against a dominant field: black in one case, white in the other. In both, Mastelletta challenges academic balance by allowing colour and light to determine the structure of the image.
Landscape is perhaps the richest and most characteristic area of his art. Malvasia remembered him as a painter of paesi with elegant and spirited little figures, and Benati too insists that his contribution to landscape painting should not be treated as marginal. Yet he is not a landscape painter in the Roman sense that was forming around Annibale Carracci, Paul Bril, Adam Elsheimer and their followers. In Mastelletta, landscape is rarely a neutral setting, and it is not simply an independent field of natural observation. The story and the setting belong to one another. At the same time, landscape often becomes so dominant that it nearly overtakes the narrative. This is why his best paintings can seem to hover between biblical history, pastoral fantasy, genre, and visionary landscape.
Against Annibale’s classical landscape, Mastelletta’s landscape remains anti-classical. Annibale’s landscapes tend towards balance: selected nature, measured recession, figures and setting held in calm relation. Mastelletta’s landscapes are more brittle and unsettled. Trees become screens or dark masses pierced by points of light. Cities in the distance become shadowy or fabulous. Hills, promontories, rocky outcrops and architectural fragments appear less as observed topography than as parts of an invented geography. Nature is not a stable order into which human action is harmoniously placed. It is affected by the same spiritual and pictorial disturbance that shapes the figures.
Nicolò dell’Abate is one of the important precedents here. From Nicolò, Mastelletta could take the idea of a broad landscape field in which the human episode is reduced in scale and dispersed across a larger setting. But he removes much of Nicolò’s courtly poise. The older world of fable becomes more anxious, less gracefully suspended. The recession of space is often chromatic rather than strictly perspectival: dark bands, pale distances, sudden luminous passages, cold greens and acid yellows, with figures and episodes staged across the surface. Coliva’s comparison with Nicolò helps clarify the paradox of Mastelletta’s landscape art: it looks back to sixteenth-century sources, but it uses them to produce a mood that feels peculiarly estranged.
This helps explain the variety of Mastelletta’s subjects. He paints major religious commissions, altarpieces, biblical landscapes, literary scenes, outdoor banquets, riders in wooded settings, and pictures that approach everyday genre. The large church paintings push his visionary and theatrical instincts onto a monumental scale, sometimes with awkward or overwhelming results. The smaller or medium-sized works made for private rooms often show him at his most natural. In these, biblical or literary subjects can become cultivated entertainments, full of elegant figures, secondary incidents, landscape invention and brilliant, smoky brushwork. Benati’s emphasis on pittura da stanza is therefore not merely social history. It helps identify the scale and function for which Mastelletta’s art was most naturally suited.
This does not mean that the private pictures are slight. On the contrary, their apparent lightness often carries the most original part of his invention. A subject from Moses, a pastoral rest, a banquet, a wooded journey or a Samaritan episode becomes an opportunity to test relations between figures and setting, colour and ground, narrative and digression. The action may be small, even marginal, but the painting is not empty. It depends on the pleasure of looking across a surface that continually offers incidents: figures bending, animals waiting, water glinting, trees opening or closing the scene, cities or obelisks appearing in the distance, clouds thickening into weather.
In the later phase, the approach changes. Under the growing authority of Guido Reni, Mastelletta’s colour becomes lighter and more open, and his figures often gain a larger, more solemn presence. Malvasia judged this second manner harshly, but Benati is right to treat it more carefully. It is not simply decline. The later paintings may lose some of the nervous brilliance of the earlier landscapes and dark-manner works, but they retain Mastelletta’s habit of digression and pictorial aside. Even serious subjects can contain odd secondary details, descriptive pleasures, or shifts of tone that prevent the image from becoming wholly regular.
Mastelletta’s style, then, cannot be reduced to “bizzarria”, though the word still points to something real. His paintings are strange because they bring together elements that do not fully settle: Bolognese reform and Mannerist memory, Ludovico and Parmigianino, Tintoretto’s spiritual light and Bassano’s descriptive abundance, private-room pleasure and sacred unease, landscape breadth and narrative fragmentation. He is not a painter of classical resolution. He is a painter of disturbed inheritance, recovering older pictorial languages and making them act in unexpected ways within the early Seicento. That is why his works can appear old-fashioned and original at the same time.
A selection of five works
The following five works do not attempt to represent Mastelletta’s career comprehensively. They offer instead a route into several of its most characteristic aspects: the ambitious but difficult scale of public sacred painting, the persistence of Carracci models, the painter’s highly personal treatment of biblical landscape, and the increasingly expansive relation between small figures and imaginative settings. Together they show why Donducci cannot be reduced either to a minor follower of the Carracci or to a picturesque eccentric. His art belongs to the same Bolognese world as Ludovico, Annibale, Spada and Tiarini, but it repeatedly moves towards a more unstable pictorial language: lighter and darker manners, uncertain spaces, elongated figures, theatrical incident and landscapes that are never merely background.
The selection begins with the vast Miracolo dei quaranta annegati in San Domenico, one of the major documented anchors of Mastelletta’s career. It then turns to the Resurrezione in San Salvatore, where an Annibale Carracci model is reworked through Donducci’s own spatial and landscape interests. The remaining three works move towards the more private and collectible forms of painting in which Mastelletta was often most at ease: the Ritrovamento di Mosè in Modena, the Raccolta della manna, and the Buon Samaritano. These works are especially useful for thinking about his landscape imagination. In them, narrative remains present, but the landscape begins to take on an autonomy of mood, rhythm and pictorial invention.
Miracolo dei quaranta annegati
The Miracolo dei quaranta annegati is the first of Mastelletta’s two great canvases for the chapel of Saint Dominic in San Domenico, Bologna. The cycle is one of the few secure documentary points in his career, and the restoration discussed by Coliva and Benati has clarified that the paintings should be understood essentially in relation to the documented years 1613–15, not as substantially later works of the 1630s. Malvasia’s reference to a later rifacimento had encouraged the idea of a later reconception, but the restoration showed instead an extensive reprise or retouching of an original paint surface that had already suffered from problems of cohesion and darkening.
The painting has always held a central place in writing on Mastelletta. Malvasia singled out the terrifying effect of the two San Domenico canvases, saying that they were painted with such fury and bizarreness that they inspired horror when seen close at hand. Later critics continued to return to them as examples of the painter’s most extreme invention. Marangoni saw in them an eccentric and rapid visualisation of uncontrollable fantasy, while Calvesi detected, in their unusual chromatic richness, a deep study of Venetian painting and proposed a possible journey to Venice around 1612 or early 1613.
The subject itself is treated less as an ordered miracle narrative than as a disturbance passing through the whole field of the painting. The heavenly group is displaced to the left, gathered in a mass of cloud and angels around the Virgin, and becomes the mobile centre from which the rest of the scene is activated. Light does not simply clarify the action. It scatters the composition into shocks, glimmers and agitated passages. The background includes elements that recall Roman favolismo, especially the illuminated landscape on the promontory, but these are drawn into a much less stable pictorial system.
The most striking effect is the collapse of natural distinctions in the lower part of the canvas. Water, land, wave, body and cloth become difficult to separate. What might have been a clear account of rescue and danger is transformed into a confused visionary field, where the figures seem to be composed of reflections, soft gradations and luminous fragments. The bilateral tree screens still provide a kind of scenic structure, but that structure is continually disturbed by the storm, the flickering foliage, and the splintered effect of the dry trunk, drapery and clinging figure at the right. For Coliva, this is where Mastelletta grasps the implications of Tintoretto’s light most fully: not as an accessory to form, but as something that changes the structure of the image itself.
Resurrezione
The Resurrezione in San Salvatore is important because it shows Mastelletta working in direct relation to Annibale Carracci. The painting derives from Annibale’s Resurrection, now in the Louvre, and therefore brings Donducci into contact with one of the central models of Bolognese reform. Yet the interest of the work lies not simply in its dependence on Annibale, but in the way Mastelletta alters the inherited structure.
The catalogue entry draws attention especially to the landscape insertion on the right-hand side, beneath the inverted triangle formed by the angels and the resurrection standard. This is a small but revealing detail. In Annibale, the structure of the image is governed by a more disciplined relation between figure, action and sacred drama. In Mastelletta, the borrowed model is opened to another concern: the desire for bare, spacious backgrounds and for an invented landscape-space that does not simply support the narrative but begins to draw attention to itself.
This makes the Resurrezione useful within this selection, even without a secure date. It does not have the overwhelming visionary disorder of the Miracolo dei quaranta annegati, nor the landscape breadth of the later biblical canvases. Instead, it shows him negotiating between a prestigious Carracci model and his own instincts. The bodies and gestures still belong to a sacred action, but the space around them is not neutral. The right-hand landscape becomes a sign of the painter’s developing interest in open, bare, somewhat estranged settings. The catalogue connects this concern with the large lateral canvases in the sacristy of the Servi in Bologna, where the spacious background would be more fully developed.
The painting can therefore be read as one of Mastelletta’s attempts to work within the language of monumental sacred art without becoming fully absorbed by it. Annibale provides the point of departure, but Donducci’s own pictorial temperament appears in the areas where the model loosens: in the treatment of space, in the relation between the miraculous event and the surrounding emptiness, and in the refusal to let the composition resolve itself into purely classical order.
Il ritrovamento di Mosè
The Ritrovamento di Mosè in the Galleria Estense is one of Mastelletta’s best-known and most admired paintings. The catalogue describes it as a work that has attracted broad critical approval, and Ghidiglia Quintavalle is quoted as seeing the historical subject as almost a pretext for developing chiaroscuro values against a landscape background. She also identifies the structure of the composition as two groups arranged according to an exceptionally refined linear rhythm, drawing on the elegant and pointed inventions of Parmigianino.
The painting belongs to the moment when Mastelletta’s landscape imagination becomes calmer and more spacious after the experience of the San Domenico canvases. Coliva places the Estense and Doria Ritrovamento di Mosè a year or two after the works around 1615–16 in which Mastelletta’s landscapes acquire a new atmospheric breadth. In these later biblical landscapes, the sixteenth-century Ferrarese paradigms of Dosso and Nicolò dell’Abate are not repeated directly, but thinned out, analysed and made stranger. Mastelletta seems to control his fantasy more deliberately, seeking what Coliva calls a new and vaguely disturbing silence.
The picture shows how narrative and landscape are held in a delicate but unequal balance. The finding of Moses remains the nominal subject, but the scene does not press forward as dramatic history. The figures form refined groups within a wider landscape order. Architecture, water, foliage and distant space become essential parts of the painting’s effect. The background is not the dark, oppressive twilight found in some earlier works. It is defined by a clearer, more reflective luminosity, a kind of fabulous geography made from inlets, promontories, ports, boats and buildings.
This is one of the works in which Mastelletta’s debt to Parmigianino and Nicolò dell’Abate is most easily felt without becoming simple imitation. The figures retain a Mannerist elegance, but the painting as a whole is not merely decorative. Its beauty depends on the slight displacement between subject and setting. The event is legible, yet it has become secondary to an atmosphere of luminous suspension. The biblical story is not erased, but it is absorbed into the rhythm of the landscape and the refinement of the pictorial surface.
La raccolta della manna
La raccolta della manna belongs to the later 1610s and is linked in the entry in the 2007 Fondantico volume on Mastelletta with a group of large biblical landscapes from Donducci’s mature production for private settings. The painting had reappeared on the international market a little more than ten years before that entry was written. Its scale and character suggest that it may have belonged to the same series as the two large biblical canvases with Il trionfo di David and Il ritrovamento di Mosè in the private apartments of Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj in Rome. The entry stresses the similar relation between figures and landscape, the unusually lightened chromatic range, and comparable compositional solutions.
The proposed chronology follows Coliva’s dating of the Doria paintings to the end of the second decade. At the same time, the painting still retains precise reminders of the great San Domenico canvases of 1613–15. The difference is one of tone and occasion. Where the San Domenico pictures are tumultuous and visionary, the Raccolta della manna moves towards an effect of daylight. The same instinct for crowding, incident and scenic distribution remains, but it is translated into a more courtly and luminous mode.
Benati notes the woman with the amphora on her head, whose majestic movement recalls the analogous figure in the large Natività del Battista, painted for the sacristy of the church of the Servi in 1618. This kind of figure is characteristic of Mastelletta’s way of giving individual accents to a larger narrative field. The biblical event is broken into passages, poses and descriptive incidents. The gathering of manna is not reduced to a single dramatic centre. It spreads across the canvas as a landscape event, with groups of figures distributed through space and held together by colour, light and movement.
The painting therefore belongs to the side of Mastelletta that Benati connects with pittura da stanza. Although large in scale, it is not primarily a work of severe public devotion. It is a cultivated biblical landscape, suitable for private viewing, in which the sacred subject becomes an occasion for pictorial pleasure: brightened colour, animated groups, elegant figures and the interplay between narrative and setting.
La parabola del buon Samaritano / Il buon Samaritano
Il Buon Samaritano is especially valuable because it shows Mastelletta pushing the landscape element towards unusual breadth. Coliva presented it as a previously unknown work which confirmed his movement towards a broader landscape mode, anticipating the Doria landscapes and otherwise only faintly suggested by the two large landscapes from the Ospedali di Faenza, the Fuga in Egitto and the scene of Herod searching for the Christ Child. The painting opens an immense space through expansive nature and enveloping vegetation, punctuated by small figurative episodes, a marine view and an obelisk in an airy clearing. That obelisk was connected by Coliva with Nicolò dell’Abate’s Caccia in the Galleria Spada.
The 2007 Fondantico catalogue entry emphasises the surprising amount of space given to dense woodland. The figures occupy only a limited part of the canvas. This is not simply a matter of reducing narrative to landscape, but of changing the balance between human action and surrounding nature. The parable remains identifiable, yet the scene is dominated by vegetation, sky, weather and depth. The almost palette-knife handling of the sky, used to convey the stormy thickening of the clouds, gives the painting an atmosphere of instability. Elisabetta Sambo praised its cold and pearly tones and connected it stylistically with the two Faenza canvases.
This is the kind of work that makes the label “landscape painter” both useful and insufficient for Mastelletta. Landscape is preponderant, but it is not neutral scenery. Nor is the parable merely an excuse for topographical invention. The smallness of the figures changes the spiritual temperature of the story. The wounded man, the Samaritan and the surrounding episodes are placed within a world that seems larger, colder and less securely ordered than the moral clarity of the parable might suggest.
As a final work in this selection, the Buon Samaritano shows Mastelletta at his most suggestive as a painter of invented landscape. The Carracci ideal landscape had sought balance between humanity and nature. Mastelletta’s landscape is more elusive. It is spacious, poetic and faintly disquieting, with human action embedded in a setting that seems to exceed it. In that sense the painting brings together several of his most distinctive qualities: the memory of sixteenth-century landscape, the reduction of figures to small narrative signs, the taste for atmospheric strangeness, and the refusal to let sacred narrative settle into ordinary clarity.
Conclusion
Mastelletta remains difficult to summarise because his art does not move cleanly towards the forms of order normally associated with early seventeenth-century Bologna. He belongs to the Carracci world, and cannot be understood apart from it, but he repeatedly approaches that world from the side: through Parmigianino, Nicolò dell’Abate, Bassano, Tintoretto, late Venetian colour, and the mixed inheritance of Bolognese and Ferrarese painting. His originality lies less in a clean break with tradition than in the way he reactivates older pictorial languages at a moment when Bolognese art was being reorganised around reform, clarity and decorum. What might at first appear old-fashioned becomes, in his hands, a source of disturbance.
This is why the old language of bizzarria remains useful only if it is handled carefully. Malvasia’s vivid account helped preserve Mastelletta’s name, but it also encouraged the idea that the painter’s strangeness could be explained through temperament or anecdote. Modern criticism, especially Coliva and Benati, makes it possible to see something more precise. Donducci’s eccentricity was not simply a biographical oddity. It was a pictorial choice, formed within the culture of Bologna, sharpened by Rome and by private collecting, and sustained by a serious knowledge of the very traditions he appears to unsettle.
The five works considered here show that range. The Miracolo dei quaranta annegati tests his visionary language on a vast public scale, where miracle, storm, water, bodies and light are drawn into a single unstable field. The Resurrezione shows him working from Annibale Carracci while already allowing landscape and empty space to disturb the inherited model. In the Ritrovamento di Mosè and the Raccolta della manna, biblical history becomes a form of cultivated landscape painting, with figures, architecture and atmosphere held in a more spacious and luminous order. In the Buon Samaritano, the narrative is almost overtaken by woodland, weather and distance, so that the moral episode appears within a world larger and stranger than itself.
Taken together, these paintings suggest why Mastelletta is most convincing when approached not as a failed classicist, nor simply as an eccentric religious painter, but as an artist of unstable relations: between figure and setting, narrative and digression, light and form, sacred history and visual pleasure. His best works do not always clarify their subjects. They suspend them. Biblical events, miracles and parables unfold in spaces that seem at once theatrical, decorative and inwardly unsettled. Landscape in particular becomes more than a background. It is the medium through which sacred or poetic feeling spreads across the whole image.
For that reason, Mastelletta’s importance is not confined to the margins of Bolognese painting. He illuminates one of its less orderly possibilities. Around the Carracci reform there existed not only the path towards classicism, not only the line that leads from Annibale to Domenichino and Albani, or from Ludovico to Reni and Guercino, but also more eccentric routes through the same materials. Donducci belongs to that less regular history. He is a painter of private rooms as much as of churches, of biblical landscapes as much as altarpieces, of luminous fragments as much as composed figures. His art keeps faith with the past, but not peacefully. It turns inherited forms into something nervous, capricious, sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkward, and often unexpectedly haunting.
[Producing these essays requires care, time, research, and resources. Contributions to help sustain this exploration would be greatly appreciated.]
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Selected bibliography
Benati, Daniele, ed. Giovanni Andrea Donducci detto il Mastelletta. Un genio bizzarro. Bologna, 2007.
Benati, Daniele, ed. Collezione di antichi maestri emiliani. Exhibition catalogue, “Incontro con la pittura”, 4. Bologna: Fondantico, 1996.
Coliva, Anna. Il Mastelletta. Giovanni Andrea Donducci 1575–1655. Rome, 1980.
Ghidiglia Quintavalle, Augusta, and A. C. Quintavalle, eds. Arte in Emilia. I. Parma, 1960–61.
Riccòmini, Eugenio. L’arte a Bologna dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Bologna, 2011.
Sambo, Elisabetta. In La gloria della pittura. Dal Francia ai Gandolfi, edited by Daniele Benati. Bologna, 2006, pp. 52–54, no. 9.
Winkelmann, Jürgen. Review of Anna Coliva, Il Mastelletta. Giovanni Andrea Donducci 1575–1655. Prospettiva, no. 25, April 1981, pp. 81–88.
Inner Surfaces 