Description

The production of the painter Bartolomeo Biscaino is very much influenced by his personal vicissitudes. Trained in his hometown – Genoa – Bartolomeo Biscanio died at the age of 28 due to the terrible plague that struck the city in 1656. His father, a modest landscape painter, was his first teacher, but the paintings by Guido Reni in the church of Gesù and Giulio Romano in the church of Santo Stefano had a more significant impact on him. In 1650 he was at the school of Valerio Castello, from whom he inherited the tones of his palette, making them more nuanced in his strokes, and the composition of the figures, influenced by the experience of Procaccini and Correggio. In this St. Joseph with Child, we find many of these characteristics: there is an evident dependence on the examples mentioned above in applying the colours and in the composition, which Biscaino renders very balanced, as well as in the masses. Indeed, the artist did not have the opportunity to develop his style due to his premature death, but what is unquestionable is the quality of his early artistic production, refined and receptive to the developments in Genoese painting in the first half of the century and the famous examples preserved in his city. The painter’s delicate attention to the rendering of St Joseph’s face and expressiveness, gentle and subdued, deprived of patheticism, is also worthy of note.

Bibl.: O. Grosso, Genova e la Riviera Ligure, Roma 1951, p. 100.