Lo Spagna

Background

His name was Giovanni di Pietro, but he was known as Lo spagno because he was born in Spain.

Education

After Raphael, he was a main pupil and follower of the Umbrian painter Perugino, whose style his paintings develop.

Career

Nothing whatever is known of his early life, or how he became a member of the Perugian school. There is a marked absence of individuality about his style, which seems like an imitation of the earliest manner of Raphael and that of Pinturicchio in a weaker and less virile form. The chief of his numerous panel. paintings are the "Nativity, " in the Vatican, and the "Adoration of the Magi, " in Berlin. In 1510 Lo Spagna executed many frescoes in Todi, and in 1512 several other mural paintings in and near Trevi.

His most important works were frescoes at Assisi and Spoleto, of which some exist in good preservation. He received the freedom of the city of Spoleto in 1516, as a reward for his work there.

Lo Spagna's frescoes reach a much higher standard of merit than his panel pictures.

Lo Spagna was alive in 1528, but he appears to have died before 1530, as in that year a pupil of his named Doni completed a fresco in S. Jacopo, near Spoleto, which Lo Spagna had begun.

Achievements

• The famous Sposalizio, or Marriage of Joseph and Mary, in the museum at Caen, formerly attributed to Perugino, is now credited to Lo Spagna. The Capitoline Museums in Rome now possess a very beautiful series of life-sized fresco figures by him, representing Apollo and the Nine Muses.
  
  Lo Spagna had various pupils and followers, among them Bernardino Campilius.

Connections

Lo Spagna married Santina Martorelli from one of Spoleto's leading families and here he was nominated Capitano delle Arti dei Pittori e degli Orefici in 1517.