Bembo, Bonifacio
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Cremona
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Bonifacio Bembo is generally identified as the artist behind the original Visconti-Sforza Tarot.
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Italian painter born in Brescia 1420 ca. Still active in 1477.
He is one of the last great representatives of gothic art in Lombardy. After a first period spent in Cremona, Milan and Pavia, in the 1447 Bembo entered to the service of the Sforza dukes (who followed the Visconti), he carried out for them an immense activity as a painter and illuminator. He was influenced by Michelino, the Zavattari brothers and Gentile from Fabriano. He still fascinates with kind, aristocratic, elegant shapes, of the purest gothic tradition, at a time when Foppa was already renewing the Lombardic painting in the direction of the Renaissance.
His early activity in Cremona produced the wooden ceiling of the Meli House (today in the local Civic Museum), and his tarot cards, whose figures designed and colored with extreme elegance. Always in Cremona there are examples of his mature art: The frescoes about the Histories of the Virgin, portraits of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti (in Cavalcabò Chapel in the church of S. Agostino) 1450 ca. Pala della Incoronazione (Cremona, civic museum) 1460 ca. This painting is also interesting for its original iconography (Christ and the Virgin are crowned by God). S. Alessio and S. Julian (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera) parts of a polyptic whose other elements have been lost.
The frescoes he painted in the great hall of the Sforza Castle in Milan (1456) and in the Castle of Pavia (1468) have gone lost. Of what he painted for the Sforza family, only the Chapel in the Sforza Castle remains. Of Bonifacio Bembo we still have 289 drawings about the History of Lancelot of the Lake (Florence, National Library). Bonifacio's brother Benedetto was slightly different in style. In his Polyptic of Torchiara (Milan, civic museum, signed and dated 1462) he tries to join a linear gothic rhythm with a more plastic construction of the figures, following the example of Squarcione and Mantegna.
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