Altobello Melone

Altobello Melone (c. 1490–1543) was a Renaissance painter born in Cremona, whose work joins the Lombard tradition to the emerging Mannerist style. In Cremona he encountered the older Girolamo Romanino, and the likeness between them is close enough that the Venetian writer Marcantonio Michiel described him as Romanino's disciple. His principal commission was a cycle of frescoes in Cremona Cathedral, begun under a contract of December 1516 and continued until 1518, which required his scenes to be more beautiful than those of his predecessor Boccaccio Boccaccino. The seven scenes he painted there, the Massacre of the Innocents among them, show a new forcefulness in gesture and a grotesque distortion of faces. His paintings are now in collections in Milan, Bergamo, London and Budapest. Here: Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and The Road to Emmaus.