Minneapolis Institute of Art

Opere varie incise da Benigno Bossi

Benigno Bossi

Date

1755–89

Medium

Album of 180 etchings on 114 sheets

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Benigno Bossi was a talented, multi-faceted artist active mainly in Parma and Dresden. His main medium was stucco, but he is most widely remembered as a printmaker due to the dissemination of his wares. This album of etchings contains the lion’s share of his mature printed oeuvre, some 180 plates. The etchings speak to his interest in the work of the great Parmese artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola (a.k.a. Parmigianino) and his collaboration with the exceptionally creative decorative artist and architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot. In 1761, Bossi began to work on a major stucco project, making trophy decorations for the façade of Church of Saint Peter, working after designs by Ennemond Alexandre Petitot. This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. Bossi went on to make many prints after Petitot’s designs, including two fabulous series: one of fantasy vases, the other of costumes based on Greek architecture. The album includes more than 30 of Bossi’s prints based on drawings by Parmigianino. His prints were not exact facsimiles; rather, they were interpretive in nature. In addition to line etching, he employed aquatint and mezzotint and sometimes printed with colored ink to convey the texture, flow, and materials of Parmigianino’s drawings. Bossi also produced a substantial quantity of etchings of his own design, many of them being fantasy heads. Delightful in their own right, they could also provide ideas for painter hoping to populate their works with exotic figures from other times and places. Italy, Europe

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