Rosso Fiorentino

(Giovanni Battista di Jacopo Rosso, 1494-1540)

   Florentine painter, later active in France. From the early 1520s he was one of the young artists whose work marks the transi-tion from the balanced, harmonious style known as High Renaissance to the "mannered" style that emerged at Florence about 1520 and is known as mannerism. Trained in the Renaissance style by Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) at Florence, by 1521 he had produced his De-scent from the Cross, a treatment of a sacred theme that violates all conventions of the genre and defiantly rejects the stylistic tradition in which the painter himself had been trained. The exaggerated emo-tions of the figures, the use of color, the strange expression and pos-ture of the dead Christ and other human figures are extreme examples of the deliberate exaggeration, the studied disharmonies, and the emotionalism and violence that define the mannerist style. In 1524 Rosso went to Rome but left after the disastrous Sack of Rome in 1527. After a brief stay in Venice, he accepted an invitation from the king of France, Francis I, to work in France, where his principal work was in the king's chateau at Fontainebleau. Other paintings that show his radical new style are Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro (1523) and Dead Christ (1526).