A violent struggle that is almost a dance. The Rape of the Sabine Women by Girolamo Mirola

We know very little about Girolamo Mirola, and one of the few certainties about him is his very close proximity to that great painter who was a kind of his alter ego, the Parma-born Jacopo Zanguidi, known as Bertoja: in recent art historiography there has existed, and in part still exists, a real “Mirola-Bertoja problem,” as Augusta Ghidiglia Quintavalle called it, emphasizing the question of the nature of the relationship between the two, who were also at work together in and around Parma. A recent critical work, which has been nourished by the studies of personalities such as Maria Cristina Chiusa, Dominique Cordellier, Diane De Grazia, David Ekserdjian, Augusta Ghidiglia Quintavalle, Vittoria Romani, Pierre Rosenberg and others, and which has culminated in the fine spring 2019 exhibition at the Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato, sought to make a distinction between their personalities in order to untie the knot that has often led art historians to classify works attributable to their manner in a generic “Bertoja-Mirola” formula.

Two artists struck by a certain critical misfortune, mentioned at most as epigones of Parmigianino, and yet artists with distinct identities, authors of very valuable works, protagonists of a season, capable of speaking an international language, flourished in an era marked by prolific, changing and numerous exchanges between northern and centralItaly and between Italy and France, especially after Primaticcio’s call to Fontainebleau in 1532, an event that attracted to Paris a host of Bolognese artists capable of circulating ideas with drawings and prints or returning to Italy strong in new experiences and thus able to help spread, mainly in Emilia and Rome, the bellifontain taste. Bertoja and Mirola were both fascinated by the anticlassical and coruscating elegances of Parmigianino, as well as by the algid and fairy-tale-like painting of Niccolò dell’Abate, and they both worked in the Bologna that was affected by the suggestions introduced by the émiliens à Fontainebleau: Bertoja, for example, had collaborated with Prospero Fontana in the Pepoli Chapel in San Domenico. Mirola, on the other hand, worked together with an artist who, unlike Fontana, had never been to France, namely Pellegrino Tibaldi, but who had been active in the Roman building sites at the time when Cardinal Giovanni Ricci di Montepulciano called to his residence, thepresent-day Palazzo Ricci-Sacchetti, artists such as Marc Duval and Ponce Jacquiot, and another prelate, Girolamo Capodiferro, had a team of plasterers arrive from France to decorate his Roman residence (the present-day Palazzo Spada, now the seat of the Council of State) in order to make what Federico Zeri would later call the “Fontainebleau in reduced size.”

The stories of Bertoja and Mirola are, in short, quite similar. “The blurred boundaries between the repertoire of the two masters,” wrote Maria Cristina Chiusa, “have increased an aura of mystery around the pair,” and the “uncertain attributive oscillations from one to the other, as in an unsolved detective story, due to the complexity of the cultural and stylistic issues involved, have not found an exhaustive solution to date.” In the face of such uncertainties, it will therefore come as no surprise that Girolamo Mirola’s masterpiece, the Rape of the Sabine Women in the Bologna Civic Museums, has in the past been attributed to Bertoja. Normal, in a framework of such strong similarities and substantial disinterest in the vicissitudes of the two Emilian artists, ignored even by their contemporaries: their mentions, in the literature of the sixteenth century, can be counted on the fingers of one hand (not missing Vasari, who in his Lives spoke only of Mirola: “in Parma is today, next to the lord duke Ottavio Farnese, a painter called Miruolo, I believe, of Romagna nation, who, besides some works done in Rome, has painted in fresco many stories in a little palace that the said lord duke had made in the castle of Parma”). Oblivion began precisely after the death of Ottavio Farnese, second duke of Parma and Piacenza, the greatest patron of Bertoja and Mirola, who were employed by him together in that marvelous building site that is the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma. And today the two artists are also little represented in museums, but that little ranks among the highest and most admirable products of the entire sixteenth century in Emilia.

Girolamo Mirola, The Rape of the Sabine Women (oil on canvas, 153.5 x 210 cm; Bologna, Musei Civici dArte Antica, Collezioni Comunali dArte, inv. 1245)

Girolamo Mirola’s The Rape of the Sab ine Women dates right from the time when the two were engaged at the court of Octavius. Here, the artist resolves the theme with a composition that squares off excitedly in a swirling space, with a pattern that almost recalls that of a vortex. The protagonists are the Romans scrambling to pounce on the Sabine women: in the foreground, the last moment of the story, with the unfortunate women trying with their now-born offspring to implore the knights to cease hostilities. In the background, the violence reaches its climax, with the Roman soldiers already seizing, grasping, dragging, tugging, throwing to the ground and hauling away by weight their prey almost to the beach in the distance, sometimes hoisting them like trophies, in a furious clash that does not spare even the horses, caught as they are in biting each other, brutal and disturbing. In the background is another moment in the story, that of the killing of Tarpea with the Romans pouncing on her with their shields, and then ancient ruins, a city overlooking the sea, the flames of a fire blazing in the distance.

In this struggle of all against all, the memory of Michelangelo’s Roman torments lingers vividly, but this kind of fine ferocity, aestheticized in melodious and unnatural accents, is also found in the decorations of Ottavio Farnese’s palace. Therefore, one does not perceive the brutality of a brutal and animalistic contention: Mirola’s takes on, rather, the connotations of a tangled fantasy created by the genius of an educated, elegant, eccentric painter, interested in sublimating the episode, rather than recounting it. Not without some grotesque accents: observe the expressiveness of certain characters. Jacopo Zanguidi’s works, too, certainly move to the rhythm of dance, but Mirola is distinguished by a more dilated subject matter, bodies that tend to be larger, and a certain tendency toward stereometry: “programmatic cubism,” Ferdinando Bologna had said in reference to the way Mirola almost inscribed his bodies within solids.

Precisely on the occasion of the Fontanellato exhibition, Maria Cristina Chiusa, while recalling how the painting in the past has led scholars to take the most diverse positions on its authorship (between those who attributed it to Bertoja, those to Mirola, and those who considered it to be the fruit of the hands of both), captured the characters of fluidity and refinement that dictate its rhythm: in this struggle that looks more like a dance, “the dynamic figures, with their prone, sometimes improbable poses, recall the features and attitudes of the protagonists known to us from Mirola’s universe, many of whom are present in the rooms of the Giardino in Parma.” Also arguing in favor of an attribution to Mirola are the drawings, although, recalled David Ekserdjian, only three sheets undoubtedly preparatory to his works exist: the English scholar juxtaposed with the Rape of the Sabine Women, also at the Labyrinth exhibition, a sheet from the Art Institute of Chicago, acknowledging, however, that “Mirola’s style is very difficult to recognize with absolute certainty without the support of some specific similarity.” Vittoria Romani, on the other hand, found how the drawing of a Rape of the Sabine Women preserved in Uppsala and until 2016 given to Battista Franco turned out instead to be a preparatory sheet for the Bolognese painting.

Authors who both died at a young age, active mainly at private sites, standard bearers of a figurative culture that in those years, in the second half of the sixteenth century, was by then in its twilight years, Bertoja and Mirola express an art in which it is perceived (“to the point of emotion,” Claudio Strinati has written) that their world was crumbling and that their culture was now about to become history. They left too soon to realize this. And perhaps for these reasons, too, their works are so fascinating.

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