LIVIO AGRESTI, CALLED RICCIUTINO | The Lamentation

We are grateful to Dott.ssa Patrizia Tosini for endorsing the attribution to Livio Agresti on the basis of images. She records two other versions of the composition. The first, seemingly of lesser quality, is a canvas in a private collection and the second, probably the work of Agresti's workshop, is in the Church of San Secondo in Amelia.¹ Tosini dates the composition to the end of the 1560s or early 1570s, and compares it to Agresti's fresco of the The Way to Calvary of 1571 in the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome. By this date Agresti, whose early style was formed in his native city of Forlì and the surrounding towns, had settled in Rome and been strongly influenced by the elegant late Roman mannerism and reformist naturalism of his contemporaries Girolamo Muziano (1532-92) and Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta (1521-80). The figure of Christ in the present panel is strongly reminiscent of that in Michelangelo's celebrated sculpture of the Deposition, of 1547, now in the Duomo in Florence.

1 P. Tosini, Girolamo Muziano 1532-1592 dalla Maniera alla Natura, Rome 2008, p. 300, cat. nos 353, 302, the former reproduced fig. 275. For the latter Tosini cites L. Barroero, V. Casale, G. Falcidia, F. Pansecchi, G. Sapori and B. Toscano (eds.), Pittura del Sei e Settecento, Ricerche in Umbria III: la Teverina umbra e laziale, Roma 2000, cat. no. 105.