Rediscovered Girolamo Romanino Masterpiece to Auction at Bertolami Fine Art

An unpublished and recently rediscovered masterpiece by Girolamo Romanino (1484-1566 ca), 'Deposizione di Cristo nel sepolcro', will be auctioned by Bertolami Fine Art in Rome on Thursday, April 27, 2023. The painting, considered the most important Old Master work to appear on the Italian market in recent years, comes from a Lombard collection with a pre-auction estimate of €470,000-620,000. The auction house's sale of 'Dipinti e Disegni dal XV al XIX Secolo' also features a devotional tondo by Biagio d'Antonio Tucci (1445-1510 ca), a contemporary of Botticelli and Perugino who worked in Andrea Verrocchio's workshop. Romanino, a Brescian painter contemporary with Raphael and Michelangelo, was a leading figure in 16th-century Lombard painting, known for what Giovanni Testori called the 'Cappella Sistina dei poveri'—the fresco cycle on the Passion of Christ in the Church of Santa Maria della Neve in Pisogne, Val Camonica. The painting depicts an unusual iconography: not the deposition from the cross, but the entombment of Christ, in a claustrophobic composition with compressed figures. Luca Bortolotti, head of the Old Masters department at Bertolami Fine Art, noted that the work was previously described as an anonymous 16th-century Lombard school piece, but was recently recognized as a secure Romanino by experts Alessandro Nava and Francesco Frangi, without the usual scholarly disputes.