Painter of the Bible
Aurelio Luini
Aurelio Luini was a Lombard painter and the principal heir to the workshop tradition of his father Bernardino Luini, the great Milanese-Leonardesque painter of the early Cinquecento.
Life & work
Aurelio Luini was a Lombard painter and the principal heir to the workshop tradition of his father Bernardino Luini, the great Milanese-Leonardesque painter of the early Cinquecento. Born in Luino on Lake Maggiore around 1530 to Bernardino Luini and his second wife Margherita Lomazzo, trained in his father's workshop until Bernardino's death in 1532 (when Aurelio was only about two years old) and subsequently in the workshop of his older brother Pietro Luini and the broader Milanese late-Cinquecento workshop tradition, he was active in Milan and the surrounding Lombard towns for his entire career. He died in Milan around 1593.
His Christian religious work is concentrated in altarpieces and fresco cycles for the Milanese and Lombard churches, painted in his characteristic combination of late-Cinquecento Mannerist figural drawing and the soft chromatic warmth descending from his father's earlier Leonardesque workshop manner. The frescoes for the Sacro Monte di Varallo (in continuation of the great Sacro Monte sanctuary that Gaudenzio Ferrari had decorated in the previous generation), the great Last Judgment fresco for the church of San Barnaba in Milan, the Adoration of the Magi altarpieces in workshop variants for Lombard parish churches, and the Annunciation compositions in the standard Lombard format fill the painted corpus.
His personal style continued the Luini family workshop signature — soft sfumato modeling, warm flesh against deep saturated drapery color, and a particularly Lombard chromatic restraint — but in the slightly more elongated late-Mannerist proportions that defined the second half of the sixteenth-century Lombard pictorial tradition. He absorbed his father's Leonardesque vocabulary at one further remove (through workshop continuation rather than through direct apprenticeship) and inflected it toward the late-Mannerist current that ran through Milan in the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s.
He was a contemporary of the great Counter-Reformation reformer Saint Charles Borromeo, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584, and produced several altarpieces for the Borromean churches that the cardinal was building and renovating across his Milanese ministry. The Luini family workshop continued under Aurelio's direction through the 1570s and 1580s before being absorbed into the broader Lombard late-Cinquecento workshop tradition.
Notable works in detail
The Holy Family with the Infant Baptist, Saint Elizabeth, and an Attendant Angel
The Holy Family with the Infant Baptist, Saint Elizabeth, and Saint John, drawn by Aurelio Luini around 1550 in pen and ink with wash on paper and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts the iconographic subject of the Holy Family attended by Elizabeth and the small John the Baptist in the conventional Lombard sacra conversazione format. The drawing shows the seated Virgin holding the small Christ Child, with the small John the Baptist embracing the Christ Child from the side, Elizabeth standing behind in formal attendance, Joseph waiting in the background. The drawing demonstrates the Luini family workshop signature continued into the second half of the sixteenth century by Aurelio after his father Bernardino's death.
Bible scenes Aurelio Luini painted
Matthew
