Defendente Ferrari
Duchy of Savoy · Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, Piedmontese school
The story
In 1875 a Turin scholar, Francesco Gamba, published a contract drawn up in Moncalieri on 21 April 1530. The town was ordering a large altarpiece for Sant'Antonio di Ranverso, a house of the Antonine canons, an order that ran hospitals, on the road west of Turin. The painter was named as Deffendente de Ferrariis de Clavaxio, Defendente Ferrari of Chivasso. The document has since disappeared, but the polyptych still stands in the church, and Gamba used it to gather other pictures around the name. The list kept growing, and by the 1990s it ran past 100 works.
What ties them together is a look. Defendente worked almost only within the Duchy of Savoy, and his deep, enamel-like colour and sharply broken folds of drapery recall Flemish and German panels of the late 15th century. He even signed some pictures with a monogram, the letters F and P interlaced and joined to a small cross.
His birth year, around 1480 to 1485, is a deduction from the style of his earliest works, made while he was close to Martino Spanzotti, the leading painter of western Piedmont, who had settled in Chivasso. The last secure record of him is dated 12 November 1540, and he died at some point after it.
