San Lorenzo – Bartolomeo Della Gatta
San Lorenzo is the first work carried out for Arezzo by Bartolomeo Della Gatta.
Dated 1476, it's a fresco and it can be found at the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, on the right side of the front door.
The work was discovered under the plaster by the canonical F. Bigi in 1933
This fresco, of great formal taste, being dated, it's useful to reconstruct the artistic itinerary of the painter.
Piero di Antonio Dei, better known as Bartolomeo Della Gatta, also thanks to a biography devoted to him by Vasari in both the editions of the 'Lives',he was born in Florence in 1448, where he studied in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. After having taken the votes as abbot camaldolese, he has spent almost all his life in Arezzo, where he died in 1502.
Influenced by Verrocchio's art and interpreter of the lesson of Piero della Francesca, he has known how to reach an individual language that has left an important trace in Arezzo's territory, also thanks to his shop, where Domenico Pecori, Matteo Lappoli and Mariano di Giovanni were formed.
San Lorenzo is the only figure remaining of a series of saints remembered by Vasari as "done with a lot of grace, with good practice and sweetness". The subject of the work is represented standing while supporting a grille, symbol of its martyrdom with his left hand;a feather and a manuscript in his right hand.
The saint is placed in the semicylindrical vain of a painted niche, which is shell-shaped. The space is defined prospectively and rigorously built and the three-dimensionality is emphasized by the effects that the light creates on the body and from the shadow of this on the background.
The figure of the Saint results static, we don't find any movement, not even in the look, which is a fixed stare. San Lorenzo is leaning to the right, looking toward the left
The predominant colors are the various red, green, black (of the hair and the grille) and the light colors of the niche. In the workt there are allegorical and symbolic elements are presented: the halo, the manuscript (probably of religious subject) and the grille (which represents the probable cause of his death).
This fresco is a proof of the artistic evolution of della Gatta and shows one of his most meaningful abilities: to know how to represent the figures with a deep adhesion to the reality and a great expressiveness, as we can notice in his paintings of the eighties, and the figures of the frescos of the Cappella Sistina; to those of the paintings of Castiglion Fiorentino: Madonna col Bambino e i Santi Pietro,Paolo,Giuliano and archangel Michele, in the Collegiata di S. Giuliano and San Francesco stigmatist, in the municipal picture gallery; the fresco in the church of Santa Chiara in Cittá di Castello, which represents the Madonna col Bambino e i santi Martino e Benedetto.