Cristoforo Moretti

Madonna and Child between two female saints. Fresco, attributed to Moretti, from the apse of S. Calimero, Milan.

Cristoforo Moretti (documented in Lombardy and Piedmont 1451 – 1475) was a Lombard painter of the quattrocento who worked in a late International Gothic style very similar to that of Michelino da Besozzo’s last period. Few of the unsigned works later attributed to him are attributed with perfect certainty.^[1]

Born in the Province of Cremona, he is first recorded in 1451, working for the Borromeos in Milan. Between then and 1475 he is found variously in Milan, in Genoa, in Turin, in Casale, where he decorated the chapel of the Paleologi castle, and in Vercelli.^[1][2] (It seems that he was expelled from Milan in 1462, accused of having defamed the wife of Bianca Maria Visconti’s doctor.)^[3]

His best-known work, and the only one surviving to bear his signature, is probably the polyptych painted for the chapel of Sant’Aquilino next to the Milanese church of S. Lorenzo Maggiore. The work was subsequently broken up and dispersed, but most of its constituent parts were identified by Roberto Longhi in 1928. Three panels, depicting the Virgin and Child enthroned flanked by Saints Lawrence and Genesius of Rome (the latter playing a rebec), are today in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan. The whereabouts of the panel portraying Saint Peter the Martyr are unknown; however a fragment of that with Saint Lucy is in the Longhi Foundation in Florence and part of the predella, again showing Genesius, is conserved in Bologna.^[1][4][5]

Notes

1. ‘Cristoforo Moretti’, Larousse: L’Encyclopédie en ligne.
2. Castello del Monferrato – Storia, Città di Casale Monferrato.
3. Aldo Moretto, ‘Fra Canavese e Lombardia: Percorsi artistici tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento’, Il Risveglio Popolare, 4 May 2001.
4. ‘Cristoforo Moretti: The Virgin and Child Enthroned/Saint Lawrence/Saint Genesius’, Museo Poldi Pezzoli.
5. Catalogue entry for the polyptych, Museo Poldi Pezzoli.

External links

Media related to Cristoforo Moretti at Wikimedia Commons.

• Passage on Cristoro Moretti from Volume 4 of Luigi Lanzi’s, Storia pittorica della Italia dal risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fine del XVIII secolo.
• Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, Pittori lombardi del quattrocento (Milan: L. F. Cogliati, 1902), Chapter II: Cristoforo Morreti e l’influsso di Pisanello nella scuola lombarda.