NICOLÒ FRANGIPANE (news from 1563 - 1597) Ecce Homo Signed on the verso of the canvas: Nicolaus. Frangipanis Pingebat 1.5.8.6 Oil on canvas, 63X52 cm Provenance: Bergamo, private collection The drawing scheme of the painting is typically Venetian, more precisely Titianesque, and can be well compared with the Cadore painter's Ecce Homo in the Prado Museum. Frangipane's biographical story is somewhat nebulous. His presence is attested in Venice from 1563, the year of a contract for the execution of an altarpiece for the Church of Sant'Eufemia in Mazzorbo. In 1564 Niccolò appears in the Fraglia of painters in the lagoon city, while his last certain work dated 1597 is L'Autunno (Autumn) in the Museo Civico in Udine. His production, inspired by Titian and Giorgione for paintings with sacred themes, such as The Deposition in the Frari in 1593, changes completely when he tackles profane representations, in which a Giorgionesque influence can be traced in The Young Man with Hat and Flute in the collection of the Charlecote Park residence near Stratford on Avon, however, lacking the composed classicism peculiar to the master from Castelfranco. The detachment is even more evident when observing the comic and bizarre works for which the artist acquired great fame from the time of the biography compiled by Gian Marco Boschini, where he asserted that the painter's collecting fortune was due to this type of representation. Returning to the canvas under examination, it can be compared with the one in the Murnaghan collection in Dublin (see Zeri Archive, no. 39116). Reference bibliography: T. Pignatti, La fraglia dei pittori di Venezia, in Bollettino dei Musei civici veneziani, X (1965), 3, p. 16 B. W. Meijer, Nicolò Frangipane a Rimini, in Arte veneta, XXIV (1970), pp. 214-218 B. W. Meijer, Niccolò Frangipane, in Saggi e memorie di storia dell'arte, (1972), pp. 52-191