Restoration of an important renaissance fresco by Garofalo. The frescoed ceiling in one of the ground floor rooms of Palazzo Costabili is at the cutti...

Restoration of an important renaissance fresco by Garofalo.

The frescoed ceiling in one of the ground floor rooms of Palazzo Costabili is at the cutting edge of Italian renaissance painting. The building was built on the orders of Count Antonio Costabili and is in Via XX settembre as it is now known. The charming idea of re-creating a raised balcony under the sky reflects its close connection with a network of similar types of decoration promoted by the most prestigious courts and cities of the Italian peninsula and linked to Ferrara by political and cultural ties, especially Milan, Mantua, Venice, and Rome. Elegantly dressed people, some singing, some holding musical instruments, and their domestic animals look down from the “balcony” in this fresco. There aren’t many records on the building or its decorations, but historians confirm that the current premises of the Spina National Archaeological Museum were designed by Biagio Rossetti on the instructions of Costabili. Since there is no real evidence on when the frescoes were painted, their date is set at around 1508. This is before mention is made in some recently examined papers (Fedozzi, Ghelfi) of a “ground floor room with gold decorations and painted” identified as the sala del Tesoro [“treasury room”], starting from 1512. Significantly, this date coincides with that noted by Garofalo (November 1512) on the Gemäldegalerie painting in Dresden, historically known as Minerva and Neptune, in which most critics recognise the start of a neoclassical style reflecting the Raphael influence, and which became more evident in his work carried out in 1513. This style is still not manifest in the sala del Tesoro however, where the pre-neoclassi-cal style inspired by Lorenzo Costa and Perugino predominates. This is a soft style that supports the balanced exchange of glances and movements between the figures, and conforms well to the collection of romantic court literature. The most plausible date would therefore seem to be between 1508 and 1512, and this can be more precisely determined by making a comparison between this work and other work by the young Garofalo. This would indicate that the most plausible period was 1508 – 1509. It was actually the Ferrara man who was the main author of the frescoes, as first recognised by Girolamo Baruffaldi, who believed that the entire work had been executed by Benevenuto Tisi da Garofalo. We know for certain from the humanist Celio Calcagnini that Costabili had requested that a few famous artists be involved. Regardless of the many inconsistencies surrounding the life of the artist and architectural theorist, Cesare Cesariano, who worked in Ferrara, Parma and Reggio Emilia in the first decade of the fifteen hundreds, I would think that his authorship of some parts of the fresco could be confirmed, if compared, even after the recent restoral, with the compositional structure and features of the santi della papa attributed to him in Sant’Eufemia in Piacenza. The more recent identification of the artist Girolamo Bonaccioli, known as Gabriletto, is equally significant, and takes the number of recognised collaborators up to three. The deterioration of some areas of the ceilingmeans that it won’t be easy to increase that number, but new details may emerge in the future from careful examination of the lunettes. There are various theories on the identities of the people looking down from the balustrade, but the idealised features of the women’s faces and the incomplete, albeit typical, condition of some of the male characters makes it hard to be sure. The one exception would seem to be the male figure with the red hat to the left of a blond youth playing the lute as it seems to have all the features of a self-portrait of the artist. Regarding the meaning behind the room, the relationship with the long poem Anteros sive de mutuo Amore by Celio Calcagnine is probably significant. Celio states that he composed eighteen couplets for his friend Antonio Costabili, inspired by the myth of Eros and Anteros – stoically intended as requited love - for the decoration of his “cubiculum seu dormitorium”. In fact each lunette illustrates a pair of verses and narrates the birth, various life events, and characters of Eros and Anteros.