Ortolano
1487–1527 · Duchy of Ferrara · Renaissance, Ferrarese school
The story
In the documents his name is Giovanni Battista Benvenuti. Everyone called him l'Ortolano, the kitchen gardener, after his father Francesco's trade, and it is the nickname that stuck to the paintings.
What survives of him in the Ferrarese archives is a handful of notarial papers. One of 1512 states that he was over 25 years old, which puts his birth before 1487, and he turns up again in 1520 and 1524. None of those papers mentions a picture. Three of his paintings carry dates, 1521, 1524 and 1527, and the year he died is simply unknown.
He worked in the Ferrara of Duke Alfonso I d'Este, alongside Dosso Dossi and Garofalo, and his manner runs so close to Garofalo's that for centuries his pictures hung under other men's names. Roberto Longhi and Bernard Berenson, working in the last century, pulled about 20 paintings back to him. The best known is the altarpiece of Saint Sebastian with Saints Roch and Demetrius in the National Gallery in London, painted for a church at Bondeno, north-west of Ferrara.
